[HN Gopher] Anonymous public voicemail inbox
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Anonymous public voicemail inbox
Author : unixispower
Score : 140 points
Date : 2024-04-02 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (afterthebeep.tel)
(TXT) w3m dump (afterthebeep.tel)
| swyx wrote:
| how is the last message march 31? does this thing update live?
| unixispower wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| If the site blew up in popularity how would you plan to
| continue moderating the voicemails?
| unixispower wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| What's the current acceptance rate, roughly?
| unixispower wrote:
| So 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 wrote:
| love 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/matmul/
| bdavbdav wrote:
| TTS, an LLM to vet them
| internetter wrote:
| Bad idea. The appeal of sites like this is the humanity
| of it. Don't take that away.
| piperswe wrote:
| I would assume that it wasn't necessarily designed to blow
| up in popularity, but just to be a fun quirky webpage
| function_seven wrote:
| Are you waiting for news on your colon? Refresh. Jacob just
| left you a message a few minutes after you posted this comment.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| Bug: Menu doesn't work with Skype
|
| (I love the design!)
| rhaps0dy wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| Thank you for solving this mystery!
| tossit444 wrote:
| There'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
| achristmascarl wrote:
| the retro windows gui is such a perfect match for this. amazing
| work!
| nlunbeck wrote:
| The talking Minesweeper smiley is really the icing on the cake,
| love it!
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| What audio codec and parameters are used for the recordings?
| You've really nailed the 90s landline sound.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| audio 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 wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| On the telephone network it was probably u-law
| (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. (u-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... u/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 wrote:
| You 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#Ch...
| nico wrote:
| Really 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 wrote:
| For 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/_u...
| nico wrote:
| Awesome, thank you!
|
| How do you like voip.ms? Any other providers you'd recommend?
| PenguinCoder wrote:
| Not 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.
| unixispower wrote:
| voip.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 wrote:
| the 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 wrote:
| Site 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
| speps wrote:
| Any interesting ones you couldn't publish?
| unixispower wrote:
| Right 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.
| mariorojas wrote:
| I've tried to dial from Mexico and it seems like the phone is not
| available.
|
| I'm dialing +1 442 667 2337
| kxrm wrote:
| you'll need to dial international.
|
| I believe the exit code is 00 for Mexico so dial
|
| 00 1 442 667 2337
| Y_Y wrote:
| That wasn't the unary plus, it's the international exit code
| trevcanhuman wrote:
| It worked for me just as you dialed! My carrier is Telcel.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| I was hoping that we would be able to post a voice message :(
| unixispower wrote:
| Was there an issue with the inbox? I check them manually, so it
| takes me a bit to publish them
| technothrasher wrote:
| I 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.
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(page generated 2024-04-02 23:00 UTC)