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Comment by binarysolo | Hacker News Reader

I remember a time when I'd pick up every single call received... now it's the opposite, I only have it ring on recognized phone numbers + I skim voicemails, filter out the ones that leave the 3-4s of silence or autoplay text, and call back those who actually have business purpose with me.

If there exist AI robocalls that start spoofing my friends and loved ones... ugh, I can just imagine the hassle of doing due diligence for every voicemail going forward. (This does kinda remind me of the scams where someone pretends to be a kidnapped distant family member, cries in the background of the call, and asks for ransom money....)

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Android has a call screening feature that's amazing. I turn it on for any unknown number. I haven't missed any calls I wanted to receive, and everything else fails the screen.

Hopefully that doesn’t filter out important calls from unknown numbers too like job offers.

Same. If you're not already in my address book, I'm not answering your call. I don't have voice mail set up either.

That's not realistic for many people. I don't have every doctor's office that I might come in contact with in my contact database. Nor every emergency service that may contact me because of an elderly relative or someone else. And presumably you don't have a landline either so you're simply choosing to make yourself not contactable.

Which isn't a reasonable option for a lot of people assuming there are alternatives.

That's fair. I don't have any elderly relatives I'm responsible for, but if/when that situation arrises I'd probably try to set up contact records for their caregivers and providers. It's a shame that scammers and spammers have ruined our telecommunications system and that the telecom companies haven't done anything about it.

You probably should have at least an option to go to voicemail.

I do get messages from offices I don't have in my contacts database that I generally want to receive. Ignoring total junk is mostly fairly painless at least for me.

The fallback is that those callers should leave a voicemail.

At present, junk callers virtually never do, though that of course may well change.

The person upthread wrote that they also don't enable voicemail.

Point.

I'm ... strongly antagonistic to voicemail myself. But even if you don't check/listen to messages, simply noting who's left a message is a pretty good screening method. For most medical comms, you're unlikely to have a meaningful message left other than "call back" in any regard, so enabling but not listening too hard is viable.

Many medical systems now have some sort of electronic patient record which includes medical staff (MD, RN, PA, etc.) messages, though that's no silver bulet either.

> I'd probably try to set up contact records for their caregivers and providers

Won't work. I have both elderly relatives and young children, and it's possible to get calls about them from just about anyone in their respective facilities. It's not possible to try to find and list the phone of everyone who ever watches over them. Including substitutes and temps and so on.

I agree.

It is frustrating, though, that they require you to provide an exhaustive list of people who can contact them but they are under no such obligation to do the same for you.

I find it easier to set up voicemail. Unknown callers that care will leave a message. That message is speech to text processed and I can decide if to play it or call back. Anything important enough gets through even from unknown numbers. Never have to answer a spam call.

well the telcos should have thought about that before agreeing to carry packets without validating headers

Doctors have no business calling, medicine isn't done through phone. Contact is possible: when I don't answer spam calls from banks, they send me sms stating their business.

Meanwhile, in the world where I live, doctor's offices call me on a not-frequent but not-rare occasion to reschedule appointments and the like. SMS is increasingly used for a lot of routine stuff like reminders but there's still a fair number of phone calls.

Per another comment, my suburban hospital system has merged with one of the two big city systems and as a patient the electronic health records system saves quite a few phone calls and faxes being sent around. But there are still some calls.

When a phone is receiving dozens of calls per day, answering each and every simply isn't viable, not matter how critical a given call might be.

Unfortunately, it's often older people with a greater dependence on healthcare providers who are also targeted by robocallers, fraudsters, and telemarketers, often to devastating effect.

I've been mulling over an idea for some time: set up an answering machine on freepbx with an IVR that requires the caller to push a button before it's forwarded to a (ringing) phone, otherwise sayonara.

That should cut off most robocallers, shouldn't it?

Only if so few people use it that spammers don't bother to target beaking the scheme.

Google Voice does this. It makes a human press a number to be connected.

I get almost 0 spam calls on my GV number, but my carrier number is garbage. I swear they sell my ph# to spam orgs on registering.

Is it difficult for the carriers or the phone makers to determine if a message is empty, and if so, delete it? This should be an option I can turn on.

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