Pacific Telesis Group’s Pacific Bell unit is introducing a call answering service for residents of San Pedro and Milpitas, California, which it reckons has the potential to obsolete the telephone: residents can have the phone company maintain a voice mailbox for their incoming calls so that when they’re on the line or away from their phone, the service will answer their calls for them, play a short, prerecorded message in the customer’s own voice, and store the messages for later retrieval, and when the customer is back, a special interrupted dial tone alerts them there are messages stored – or they can retrieve messages from a pay phone or any touch-tone telephone; a second service, called Local Messaging, will enable users to send messages to other users through the Pacific Bell Message Center without calling recipients directly and ringing their phones, and messages may be sent to individuals or groups of people, as long as all recipients have message boxes in the Message Center – users set up their own group codes and can send messages to everyone in a preprogrammed group by pushing a few buttons on the phone; the test service costs $7.50 per month for residential users and $15 for small businesses, plus 25 cents per message sent – but to get people hooked, everything is free this month.
