Interface with phone system (Any)

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Has anyone had any experience with interfacing a phone answering program with Access? In this scenario, the phone would be answered, prompt the caller for some information (like an ID# and a PIN#), then provide some information back (such as an account balance). Ideally, this would work direct against an Access database, but it would be OK if I had to export data to it on a nightly basis,

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It isn’t clear if you have a phone answering program to provide part of this functionality and only want to interface that program with Access or you are looking for the answering program and how to interface it, Mark. Could you expand on the question? And what version of Access and Windows are you talking about?

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I’m primarily looking for the phone answering capability; ideally I would be able to interface it directly to an Access database, but it would be okay if I could export my Access data to it periodically. This is for a potential client, so probably Access2000, but unknown Windows version.

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You will need to know a bit more about the phone system and what kind of terminal they expect. It would probably be simpler to use an analog interface – the digital ones tend to be proprietary, though some vendors do have digital ports that can be manipulated by a PC through a serial port or the like. For a small system, an analog voice modem would do the trick I think. You might want to look at combining it with one of the small office voice mail systems where you can manipulate the voice message so Access would simply set the wave file to be played over the modem. I haven’t looked at the voice mail products in some time, but a few years ago there were several decent systems. Just one idea of how to tackle it.

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I was hoping someone knew of a specific product that I could investigate, which would give me a baseline for capabilities, features. and requirments.

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