Simon
I have an application that manages an eye surgery clinic.
There are some procedures that require the patients to do certain things, like removing glasses or contact lenses 2 days before, or bringing stuff to the clinic for the procedure, etc...
The problem is that even though the patients have a printed paper that states all these, they still tend to forget. Then, when they come to the procedure, they have to be postponed.
After running a questionaire for most of the patients for the last few weeks, this clinic got to the conclusion that an automated "reminding" system ( in addition to the printed letters ) would be a nice add-on.
Basically, the program i want to create now should create a cursor with the list of patients having procedures for the next week, and call them playing predefined sound files, stating mainly: "Dear Sir/Madam, your apointment has been set .... day at .... hour. Please do not forget to bring ....".
I thought also to ask the person who answers the phone to tap some key in his handset if he is not interested in receiving the reminder...
I know how to call using a normal modem, and i have been told to use the MS Direct Speech activex or MS Agent to play the sound file, hence my question...
Thank you for your help
Jaime

>As you've had two amusing answers, perhaps I'll try and help you a bit.
>
>The short answer is you probably can't.
>
>The issue you will run into is with the telco involved. It is unlikely that you will be able to detect an answering machine, because very few actually play anything back up the line in a machine-readable format. Some of those available in the UK could be accessed remotely for playback of messages; however there is a privacy issue there. The issue is similar to that of receiving party CLI being sent by the telco. That's why you don't often get the callers number displayed on your 'phone when it's an international caller. There just aren't standards and in many countries displaying a full number is illegal anyway (France for example).
>
>Can you explain what you're trying to do?
>
>It could be that there are toolkits out there that can do this already and then you interface with that through COM. I used to deal with a company called HTK in Ipswich, UK that could do this sort of thing (www.htk.co.uk)
>
>Regards
>Simon