I will pay to make my phone suck less.

[andrewducker]

There's a bit near the beginning of The Cat Who Walks Through Walls where Heinlein lays out some very useful functionality for a phone system. It's very simple, pretty obvious, and I'd like to know why nobody has actually provided it yet.

At the moment my phone can have three states - "Available for calls" (on), "Not available for any calls" (off/airplane mode) and "Divert calls" (which pushes calls elsewhere - by default to answerphone).

What I want is an additional mode "User is asleep, is your call important enough to wake them up?", whereby the call is routed to an automated system which tells people I'm asleep and asks them if they'd like to (a) put the call through anyway, (b) leave me a message on voicemail or (c) just hang up. Said voicemail would not trigger an alert on my phone until I changed mode back to "available".

Additionally while in "Leave me alone" mode all incoming text messages would get an automic response before they were delivered, telling them that I was asleep, and that if they wanted my phone to go "BEEP" then reply "Yes", otherwise the message would be delivered when I wake up.

I know I'm not the only person who would like my family/friends to be able to wake me up at 3am in an emergency, but only if they actually choose to do so. Or, indeed, if I'm in a meeting, having a date with Julie, etc. Most people would, I'd think, happily choose to be polite, and I could have a happy halfway house between "I am completely free to chat to you _right now_" and "I cannot be interrupted, no matter what".

Comments

[pseudomonas]

I would buy that system, yes! Though the text-message thing I'd drop; I think the accepted convention is that text-messages are like emails in that they're answered as and when the recipient is free.

[andrewducker]

My phone goes beep when one arrives, and I'd rather avoid that at 3 am unless it's an emergency. If course, in a real emergency they couldjust call.

[ironjeff]

"Hmmm - I'm positive that Mister Ducker will want to take advantage of this Once In a Lifetime sale on life insurance! Instruct his phone to interrupt his date!"

Maybe it needs the additional feature of a banhammer that stops abusers of privacy filters from calling anyone except emergency services for a period of 24 hours.

[gominokouhai]

I'd like it to divert to a system that asks if the caller is trying to sell something, and if so it generates a 140db tone at a frequency which shatters bone.

[firecat]

I think what you actually want is an answering service where a human will decide if the call is worth putting through. You can pay to have one of those.

[andrewducker]

That would be the ultra-perfect high-class version of the service I want.

I'd settle for the low-class automated version.

[andrewducker]

I mean, seriously, I'll move to any phone provider that offers this service.

[andlosers.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that with a bit of coding you could create something Google Voice-like that works across any Android handset. Give people a different number, and programmatically decide what happens when they call it, based on who they are, what time it is, what settings you've saved, etc etc. And then, because the Android dialer can be extended (which is what Google Voice does), use the same number to call out as well.

Potentially expensive unless you have lots of free minutes on your phone plan, of course.

[andrewducker]

It could certainly be cobbled together by adding second numbers for people and then only passing things along to the first number when they come back "awake".

Seems a tad wasteful though. Still, if the current phone service providers won't innovate...

[alitheapipkin.livejournal.com]

I have the luddite equivalent - phoning my landline will wake me up regardless of the time.

You'd think someone would have come up with this though, it seems so obvious now you say it.

[andrewducker]

I now know a few people without landlines. And it doesn't work when I'm away from home.

But for now, yes, it's as good as it gets!

[simont]

Wouldn't this have the obvious failure mode that all cold-callers and other unwanted phone drivel would inevitably press the button marked 'Yes! My 0.0001% chance of selling Andrew a job lot of reversible grommets / getting him to participate in market research / convincing him to download my computer virus masquerading as repair software is clearly important enough to get him out of the bath for.'

You need a system which also allows you to kneecap the people who abuse it :-)

[naath.livejournal.com]

It needs to only offer the "wake me up" option to people calling from a pre-set list of approved numbers I think.

I too think this would be a very good function to have.

[a-pawson.livejournal.com]

With Ice Cream Sandwich you can respond to incoming calls with a text message. In addition to answer/reject options, you can with one swipe send the caller one of a number of pre-written text messages. Handy if you are watching a DVD but requires the owner to be awake so not really what you are looking for.

Rather than have it implemented by the phone carrier, it strikes me as something that an app could be written to do. Might be worth asking on the android forums.

[andrewducker]

Same is true of earlier versions of Android - my phone does it.

As far as I know apps cannot answer calls for you. If they could, then yes, that would work perfectly!

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

We have something like that functionality at work for our help desk... by using two phone numbers, one for routine calls and one for office emergencies. The routine one will go to voice mail if no one is available, whereas the emergency number is a mobile with the ringer always on so that it'll be picked up 24/7 if something arises in the office that needs immediate attention.

Of course, this doesn't get abused because anyone abusing the emergency number will get written up (and eventually fired if they do it enough) which isn't a power available to the consumer.

-- Steve does see some value in the idea, but can't think of a way to implement it that'd both work and not be horribly vulnerable to abuse.

[laplor.livejournal.com]

YES! Why is this not already available?

I used to work an overnight shift, and I would often end up with the awkward situation of someone calling at what would normally be quite reasonable hour and I would be too sound asleep to understand them. When you go to bed at 8 am, you are not coherent enough for social calls at 1 pm.

Nobody knew when to call me so some just stopped. I would much rather have had the option to say, 'call me anytime and if I can't take the call, leave a message.'

Currently you can sort of manage that by going straight to a machine, but then if an emergency comes up peopel cannot get through. Thus a teenage son who is stuck with car trouble at 2 am doesn't get the help he may need when I would gladly be awoken to help.

[atreic.livejournal.com]

Oh gosh, yes. You are a genius. Please implement this.

[ladysisyphus.livejournal.com]

Please tell me when you develop this, and I will fund with what I can.

[ravenofdreams.livejournal.com]

I would switch immediately to this phone or provider. I need a message that says something like "You have reached Raven's phone. Is this a problem that she actually needs to deal with, or is it really your job/not important/something that can wait?"

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Hm. I wonder if one could cruft up something in Tasker?

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Mostly it doesn't exist for boring technical and practical reasons. They didn't put the extra functionality into the backend so it would have to run in the phone, and until recently that wasn't practical.

There are some after market apps which do similar things - my wife loves sly-dial which sends a call straight to the recipients voice mail.

[andrewducker]

I can't see why it could be put into the backend now. Sure, you couldn't trigger it over the control channel, but it could still be turned on/off fairly trivially by an app, or phoning your voicemail and going to the settings.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

This just goes to show that there's no such thing as a completely bad Heinlein novel.

[phillipalden.livejournal.com]

Actually, Andrew, you're not the only person who could use that "3am" feature. Since my brother's strokes I leave my mobile on all the time, (but turn it to vibrate at night.)

In fact, I'd like all the options you suggested.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

I know several people who want this functionality enough to simulate it by having an Emergency Phone, always on loud, but number given only to trusted people who will call the regular phone(s) first. Not perfect - you do get some spam calls (but fewer on a hardly ever given out number). The worst offender is usually the network operator, but they've got better. A cheapo old school dumbphone on a £10 PAYG SIM does the trick nicely - they also have astounding battery life (like >1 week), which helps with management.

Amusingly (to me), these people include Luddites who have such a phone as their only mobile, and gadget geeks who have at least one shiny smartphone as well.

[errolwi.livejournal.com]

From memory, Twitter notifications have a "don't send texts between these hours" feature.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Your "User is asleep, is your call important enough to wake them up?" setting should only be available to callers in the phone's address book, or to the emergency services. Otherwise, J. Random Phone Spammer will of course consider it an urgent priority to tell you that your Windows PC is infected with malware and please to be downloading this patch ...

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

I remember, years ago, a fake ad (April fool), that said 'we now offer a setting that allows you, if you get an engaged tone, to interrupt the recipients call if yours is more important. How do you tell if yours is more important? You press *this* code, and then you can listen to their call and decide..."

Perhaps 30 years ago. I feel old.

Anyway, the problem is that people are not good at spotting what is urgent, and there are very few things that really can't wait till morning.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough I read an article about a week ago about exactly this and why it's one of those apps which everybody agrees is super simple until you dig into the details at which point everybody becomes enraged that it doesn't by default work exactly as they and only they decide. (E.g. "It has a default 'off' off 10pm... ridiculous, I missed an important call while I was waiting for someone in the pub because they weren't on my emergency list." or "It has a default 'everyone screened' -- ridiculous I just missed a vital call because I didn't realise it was already switched on" or "It has a default assumption texts are as important as calls... ridiculous, I just got woken up by a 4am text message which wasn't an emergency").

This is unhelpful to you I know. But it struck me that the post (which I can no longer locate) was exactly right. It's that "perfect storm" application which, in fact, is rarely useful (at least for me, in that nobody does call me at 3am unless it's an emergency and I just switch text notifications to silent -- nobody TEXTS an emergency after all) but when it is useful the default assumptions are likely wrong.

Anyway, something like this might help:
http://www.androidzoom.com/android_applications/business/call-screening-call-blocker_tdjk.html

However, I bet you'll run into the fact that what the designer thinks is the only possible default option is not what you think is the only possible default option. :-)

[andrewducker]

This is why I wouldn't want a default whitelist, or anything like that. I'd want people to make decisions. This does leave you open to spam, and stupid decisions. But people can make stupid decisions now, and I don't get spam calls on my mobile at the moment.

The only real solution I've seen is for Heinlein's original suggestion - you pay a sum of money to push your call through, and then I can say "Yeah, that was an emergency, have it back." or I can say "You're a telemarketer, I'm keeping that £5 as a waking-me-up tax."