Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

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For Android at least, there are numerous call-blocking apps. I use (though am increasingly frustrated with the privacy policy and feature-creep of) Mr Number, which can block all unknown numbers as well as specific blacklisted numbers.

What I'd REALLY prefer would be a way to categorize contacts into priority groups. Family/VIP, who can reach me 24/7/365. Friends who can call most of the time. Other contacts who can reach me daylight/weekday hours. And the rest who roll straight to voicemail. Add a schedulable exception (allow all calls in the next X hours because I'm expecting one from someone whose number I can't identify in advance).

Combine this with a visual voicemail (Google's product is good, but they already own far, far, far too much of my life) and I'd bitch a lot less about phones.

Increasingly: voice calls are very distracting and annoying. Unless you've got very good reason to call me, don't. I don't even get to "please don't call me" any more, I'll simply hang up (on the rare occasions an unwelcome call gets through).

Agreed. There's a lot more to improve about phones' actual telephony.

>> Family/VIP, who can reach me 24/7/365.

Also: a message like "Hi family, I'm asleep/busy, but if you really need me, press 1 to ring me anyway" would be wonderful. They wouldn't worry about calling at a bad time, and you wouldn't get awakened for something trivial.

In general, "what would a good human assistant do?" is a good question for computer systems. A secretary wouldn't wake you unless it was important.

Take a look at Anveo, someone else said they had a lot of luck with them.

A friend and I actually wrote this exact service, you'd get a number and forward it to whatever, and depending on the who was calling and when (with some rules you would set up), they would either ring through, be prompted that you are busy/sleeping/meeting, or go straight to the cellphone voicemail.

The problem is cost. ALL calls would have to go through this system, (which have a per-minute cost if they aren't over VoIP), so our minimum monthly price for this servce would probably be $15+.

Do you think you would pay that much? Most people loved the demo we showed them, but were hesitant to pay more than a few bucks a month. But, if you think differently I'd love to hear more.

> Do you think you would pay that much?

I'd rather not, because this should really be an app, not a service. I'd pay for that app though.

iOS 6's Do Not Disturb feature has an option that lets the caller through if they call twice, which can achieve a similar effect, though not only for a specific group.

Still wouldn't have helped for the recruiter who redialed me 6 times while I was attempting to read a 400-page PDF manual (incoming calls dump you out of the Adobe PDF reader and you've got to re-find your place in the document), while attempting to recover a melted down server in the colo (hadn't anticipated this, laptop was at the office).

Solution: tell the recruiting firm never, ever, ever to contact me again.

Second solution: take off and nuke Adobe from orbit.

Third solution: ePub for docs, people. It's multi-form-factor fungible, and the readers are vastly, vastly more functional than anything built for PDF.

Fourth solution: use iBooks, it doesn't lose your page. :p

Android?

Oh... I assumed you were using iOS because you replied to my comment about iOS 6.

Do Not Disturb will be default let calls from your Favourites through first-time, only calls from other numbers will be silenced the first time.

I actually wrote this. Problem is, cheapest VoIP termination is ~$8 a month (not to mention server/bandwidth costs).

We had a nice system where you could group contacts and depending on both your location and 'status', certain people would either ring through, be prompted that they may be interrupting and ask if they'd like to proceed, or go straight to the cellphone's voicemail.

People loved the demo we'd show them, but very few loved it enough to pay more than a couple bucks a month for the service.

FWIW, Anveo is pretty cheap for this sort of thing. You could even do your workflow without much custom work: http://anveo.com/consumer/features.asp?code=personalize_call

(Unaffiliated, just a customer.)

How much do you pay per month? Do you use it for your cellphone?

I use it much like one would use Google Voice; forwarding to my cell phone and a couple of SIP phones with some call flow stuffs. A DID with unlimited incoming is $2/mo. With the e911 charge and outbound minutes I pay ~$3-$4/mo total.

RingerX VIP (for jailbroken iOS devices) isn't quite what you want, but is fairly close. iBlacklist (one of its competitors) may or may not be closer (I don't personally use that one). (They both leave a lot to be desired with respect to the UI for maintaining your categorization.)

Most of that can be done with Google Voice.

Yeah, Mr Number is definitely the least favorite thing still on my phone. Is there anything better? Just for spam-blocking, I mean.

I'd especially love to see something done in the open-source spirit.

iOS 6 has a "Do Not Disturb" mode where you can set which contacts are allowed to call, it's a step in the right direction.

I think all that automation would backfire. What if you forgot that you added someone to the voicemail list and wonder why you are not receiving calls? It's not that hard to just dismiss the call when it happens.

4.1 has built in call blocking, including the ability to turn it on and off at certain times of day etc.

Tasker can do most of what you want, and it's fairly straightforward to set up, since it's a very common use of the application.

I think call blocking like that was even introduced in Android quite a while back, was it not?

Yeah you just rattled off the features of Google Voice (plus a few other services that do the same things).

It is indeed quite nice. No jailbreaking, managed in the same place as your contacts, texts, etc. Visible online, all the other benefits of Google Voice which I won't extol in detail.

The caveat there is you also have the drawbacks of google voice, most notably that MMS messages get silently dropped so neither you nor the sender know that you never received them. There are also the privacy implications of going through google, if you care about such things.

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