10 ms·
Anonymous public voicemail inbox
- swyx 3y agohow is the last message march 31? does this thing update live?
- unixispower 3y agoI manually moderate the voicemails and run a script locally to build out a static site and upload it to Neocities. The site is relatively fresh (created within the past year); it just hasn't seen much traffic yet.
- Zod666 3y agoIf the site blew up in popularity how would you plan to continue moderating the voicemails?
- unixispower 3y agoI'm not really sure to be honest. The traffic today has me stepping away from work occasionally to process calls in little batches :) I would probably just streamline the moderation process to make it a bit easier. For various reasons I wouldn't want it to be completely automatic (for one I just like to listen to the messages).
- xanderlewis 3y agoWhat’s the current acceptance rate, roughly?
- unixispower 3y agoSo far I've only marked 1 out of 50 as a "no". There are 2 more I need to translate. So, ~94-98%? The sample size is small so far though
- d416 3y agolove this site. Check out Justine Tunney’s blog posts for pre-processing content filtering with AI using bash commands: http://justine.lol/oneliners/ http://justine.lol/oneliners/ http://justine.lol/matmul/ http://justine.lol/matmul/
- bdavbdav 3y agoTTS, an LLM to vet them
- internetter 3y agoBad idea. The appeal of sites like this is the humanity of it. Don't take that away.
- ycombinatrix 3y agoSTT not TTS
- piperswe 3y agoI would assume that it wasn't necessarily designed to blow up in popularity, but just to be a fun quirky webpage
- jetbalsa 3y agoNice to see you using voip.ms for all your science -- The number I just left for you is also hosted on it, its a fun little IVR Maze
- function_seven 3y agoAre you waiting for news on your colon? Refresh. Jacob just left you a message a few minutes after you posted this comment.
- xyzelement 3y agoJust wanted to appreciate you and this wonderful comment.
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoBug: Menu doesn’t work with Skype (I love the design!)
- rhaps0dy 3y agoThis should be a bug in Skype if anything, it should conform to normal phone interfaces. I've had the same problem in the past. I think you're likely using Skype on iOS and typing numbers for the menu on the iOS phone virtual keyboard. Instead, you should do it in the Skype app -- the phone menu ones don't work.
- rrr_oh_man 3y agoThank you for solving this mystery!
- tossit444 3y agoThere's a different person that also has this kind of project going on, it's pretty cool to see people do this more. https://linktr.ee/at_the_beep https://linktr.ee/at_the_beep
- achristmascarl 3y agothe retro windows gui is such a perfect match for this. amazing work!
- nlunbeck 3y agoThe talking Minesweeper smiley is really the icing on the cake, love it!
- 3-cheese-sundae 3y agoWhat audio codec and parameters are used for the recordings? You've really nailed the 90s landline sound.
- jcrawfordor 3y agoaudio coming right off the TDM phone network will be 8-bit samples, 8 kHz sampling rate, companded. Doing anything else requires direct IP peering (e.g. with a cellular carrier) which is out of reach of your typical inexpensive VoIP trunking provider.
- unixispower 3y agoThey come from my VoIP provider as 16bit 8kHz WAV files. I crunch them down to MP3s using ffmpeg before uploading. I don't get any say in the source quality, but I'm quite pleased with it as well.
- ale42 3y agoOn the telephone network it was probably µ-law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C-law_algorithm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%9C-law_algorithm) encoded 8-bit 8 kHz data. This is what was used on the backbone of analog landlines, and now on VoIP for landlines (outside USA and some other countries there's the A-Law, very similar stuff). It's a logarithmic encoding that gives more quality than 8-bit PCM sound while only using 8 bits per sample. If you want to convert it to plain linear data without quality loss then you need 16-bit, whence that comes out from your provider. (µ-law encoded WAV files are also a thing) > but I'm quite pleased with it as well. Have to say that despite the filtering of high frequencies making it sound, well, like a telephone... µ/A-law data sounds pretty well. Much better than GSM and most low-bandwidth codecs, especially if the encoded sound is not just pure voice but also background noise that comes with it.
- ryukoposting 3y agoYou could probably just apply a 300Hz-3300Hz band-pass filter to any given recording and make it sound really close to analog phone call audio [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service#Ch...
- nico 3y agoReally cool, thank you for posting Are you using something like asterisk or FreeSWITCH to connect to the siptrunk? If so, do you have a backend for the dialplan? Would love to see the code if possible
- unixispower 3y agoFor fun I self-host Asterisk at home, but I'm using a cheap VoIP provider (VoIP.ms) to take the burden of hosting for this project. The code that I did write to pull messages is just some boring API interfacing in a simple Python script: https://gitlab.com/unixispower/after-the-beep/-/blob/main/_utils/fetchvm https://gitlab.com/unixispower/after-the-beep/-/blob/main/_u...
- nico 3y agoAwesome, thank you! How do you like voip.ms? Any other providers you’d recommend?
- PenguinCoder 3y agoNot OP, but I recommend and use sipstation. I moved from VoIP.ms because they often had troublesome outages. Sipstation has been reliable and a good value.
- xp84 3y agoAlso not op, and nothing against any other provider, but callcentric is another provider that has been around probably 2 decades now and has never let me down. Basically everything is a la carte and cheap.
- unixispower 3y agovoip.ms has been pretty good. They got DDoS'ed shortly after I signed up which soured the experience for about a week, but I haven't had an issue for the 2 years I've been using them since. I like that they have a wiki that explains how to set up ATA devices for their service -- that's what sold me on them initially.
- spxneo 3y agothe voicemails are genuinely wholesome and theme of the 90s, i cracked up at the hot pockets one some more details about stack and implementation would be great too curious how this was built
- unixispower 3y agoSite is static built using Jekyll. Voicemail inbox is hosted using VoIP.ms. I pull the voicemails manually by running a Python script, edit the Markdown file that the script spits out to add a memo, then run another script to build and upload the site to Neocities. I thought about making a dedicated "app" for all of it, but why make it more complicated than it has to be. I manually moderate all the calls anyway, so I just stuck with a simple smattering of scripts and static hosting. You can see all the site source and scripts here: https://gitlab.com/unixispower/after-the-beep https://gitlab.com/unixispower/after-the-beep
- speps 3y agoAny interesting ones you couldn't publish?
- unixispower 3y agoRight now the ones that aren't in English, and a couple ones that are aggressively political. I'd like to take a pass at the non-english ones when I have some time to find a way to translate them.
- timando 3y agoWhisper can transcribe/translate non-english speech to english text
- nico 3y agoAre you manually creating the memo? Or are you using something like whisper for transcription and then extracting the first few words, or maybe using an LLM to write the memo?
- mariorojas 3y agoI've tried to dial from Mexico and it seems like the phone is not available. I'm dialing +1 442 667 2337
- kxrm 3y agoyou'll need to dial international. I believe the exit code is 00 for Mexico so dial 00 1 442 667 2337
- Y_Y 3y agoThat wasn't the unary plus, it's the international exit code
- trevcanhuman 3y agoIt worked for me just as you dialed! My carrier is Telcel.
- mariorojas 3y agoit seems like it's working again, thanks everyone for taking a look
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bossyTeacher 3y agoI was hoping that we would be able to post a voice message :(
- unixispower 3y agoWas there an issue with the inbox? I check them manually, so it takes me a bit to publish them
- gigatree 3y agoYou leave a message by calling the number at the top of the page
- technothrasher 3y agoI don't know why, but this reminded me of going to school in the early 90's, we'd go through the university's voicemail system inputting random phone numbers and trying the default password, '0000', which meant the voicemail on that number had never been set up. When we found one, we'd record a song as the greeting. We then posted notes by the various public phones on campus for our 'dial a song' directory so anybody could enjoy a song, like a big public jukebox. The entire thing worked well for a semester, until some killjoy updated the phone system default to disable voicemail for unused numbers and blew away all our songs.
- stavros 3y agoI really hate this. Who were the songs hurting? Nobody, someone just decided to make the world a little bit worse because it wasn't "proper".
- jazzyjackson 3y agoHurting anyone, no, but the whole jukebox probably cost the provider at least a penny all told, and that's a good enough reason for someone to close the oversight. EDIT: thinking about it again, there is such a thing as surplus capacity. Like how before we all transitioned to pay-as-you-go elastic cloud services you would just have an idling CPU you could point at SETI and folding@home. The jukebox probably didn't strain the host enough that they had to expend any actual expense, so I changed my mind, somebody might have thought they were shutting down some freeloaders but they weren't costing any money really. OTOH there are cases where viral phone forwarding blew past the system's capacity and did cause downtime, see "You and the little mermaid can both go fuck yourselves, I can't find The Books, they must be in La Jolla" [0] (Act One) [0] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/203/transcript https://www.thisamericanlife.org/203/transcript [0.1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROLM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROLM
- jrockway 3y agoI think idle CPUs still exist, people are just afraid to share them now. For example, for lowest latency you want your application servers close to your end users. Your end users probably all go to bed at about the same time and wake up at the same time. So your server is just sitting there taking up space, maybe saving a little power, overnight. But, nobody is will to take the risk to let someone else use their computer for a batch job of some sort, so the best you get is slightly less heat output and slightly less power consumption instead. For those that don't really care, the cloud providers have shared core instances, so some batch job is probably using your cycles late at night. I think the thing that killed SETI@home was crypto mining. Why help others when you can collect stuff for yourself? Plus, everyone woke up to the electricity arbitrage going on; when every employee started using their work computer to mine crypto, and the electricity bills got high, someone started looking for answers. The edict came down from on high: don't steal our electricity for yourself or for human good. Rest in peace, SETI@home and folding@home. (I was always personally a fan of Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search when those things were cool. I guess I didn't know much about protein folding or searching for extraterrestrial life, but I did understand factoring numbers.)
- xyst 3y agolol, it's all dudes.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ycombinatrix 3y agowhat's the relevancy? this isn't a dating app
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- johnisgood 3y agoIn all honesty, people tend to start dating on most apps (including games). :P People always find a way to do that!
- worddepress 3y agoI am not sure about "I'm a real boy!"
- tr90814 3y agoSuper cool - reminds me a bit of The Secrets Hotline https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-secrets-hotline/id1507242265 https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-secrets-hotline/id...
- shazz8bits 3y agoWhat a great idea! Just of curiosity, how much does it cost per month with voip.ms? Looks like a bunch of little costs per month but I could not figure out the total…
- unixispower 3y agoI don't really know yet. My provider charges by the minute, so it's heavily dependent on usage. I'd imagine the post to HN will cause a nice spike on my bill though lol
- lobito14 3y agoLeft a msg several hours ago, but it's not showing on website. What am I missing?
- layman51 3y agoIt seems to be manually moderated by one person so it might take a while.
- trevcanhuman 3y agoHe just updated the website.
- unixispower 3y agoThe site is manually moderated. I made the mistake of posting it over my lunch break and had to go back to work which caused a significant delay. I'm back on processing things now.
- RankingMember 3y agoThanks for moderating it, I figured it was too good to be true that none were horrifying/"ear rape" without manual moderation. Out of complete curiosity, what type of things are you finding the need to filter out/remove the most?
- unixispower 3y agoNot too much, actually. People hanging up without a message are the most common. There are also a few people that have played recordings of songs or other sound clips from copyrighted sources, and I don't want to deal with that mess if I don't have to. There are also the ones that are in other languages that I can't put a good memo on or moderate properly. I keep them all and just leave the ones that I don't post marked as "unpublished" in my static site builder (Jekyll) so that I can take another pass at them later when I have the time / resources. Very few have been "inappropriate". There was one with some questionable jokes that I held back and another where someone was quite angrily talking about a particular political party (there are other "political" statements I've allowed; I just don't want to the page to become some place for people to yell at each other -- not going for that vibe).
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoCollecting voice data to create train AI to speak in?
- unixispower 3y agoNope, just collecting them to listen to :)
- karmelapple 3y agoDid anyone use the Red Talking Phonebook in the 1990s? It had a phone number you could dial and then you could enter codes to get different information such as movie times, jokes, the time of day, and so on. I liked trying random codes in it to see if I could find hidden services... and eventually I did. I don't recall the exact code, but I think it was like 9987. It turned out to be basically this - an anonymous public voicemail box where you could listen to recordings other people made, and you could make your own. A few other people stumbled upon it, too, and there was a range of messages on there: some funny, some very silly, some fairly scary or weird. I've never come across anyone else who had stumbled upon this though... surely someone here has?
- b112 3y agoClosest thing to this, was a number a friend of mine was told about. We called it, and you could hear 100s of people talking, some sort of crossed analog line issue. This was in the 80s in a very rural area. Anyhow I remember everyone having fun, yelling at everyone else to be heard, but also, a few people really mad. It seemed like some people wanted to make a phone call, everyone else was just having fun. A few days later it vanished, probably to the happiness of those lines directly affected.
- DigiEggz 3y agoIncredible and nostalgic. Excellent project!
- i4k 3y agoIs this time ever coming back?
- mycall 3y agoNCN has a great show called Voice Jail [0] that includes a huge collection of comedic audio cutups on this topic. [0] https://nationalcynical.bandcamp.com/album/midnight-voicejail-episode-01-what-is-voicejail https://nationalcynical.bandcamp.com/album/midnight-voicejai...
- tudorw 3y agoThey Might Be Giants flash backs to Dial-A-Song.
- enobrev 3y agoThis reminds me of the 90s - but not just from the looks. There was a time in the mid 90s in Chicago ( maybe most cities? ) when pagers were the thing, and a pager would come with a free voicemail box. The pager companies would set the voicemail pin to the last 4 digits of the pager number. The customer was meant to change it when they first signed up for their account. And so I knew quite a few people who would test numbers all day and night to steal voicemail numbers and then use them for all sorts of things. Promoting raves and other parties Party lines Message boards Various things involving graffiti. It was a normal thing back then to find a local pay phone and call a couple known voicemail boxes for figure out what to do that weekend or to see where friends were going to be.
- kocyigityunus 3y agogreat design. loved it.
- nirvael 3y agoLongmont Potion Castle vibes
- vmfunction 3y agoRemind me of http://cel.ly http://cel.ly, where sms is available online. Looks like they are not operational anymore.
- anjc 3y agoGreat idea. Americans are so funny.