I don't really know yet. My provider charges by the minute, so it's heavily dependent on usage. I'd imagine the post to HN will cause a nice spike on my bill though lol
The site is manually moderated. I made the mistake of posting it over my lunch break and had to go back to work which caused a significant delay. I'm back on processing things now.
Thanks for moderating it, I figured it was too good to be true that none were horrifying/"ear rape" without manual moderation. Out of complete curiosity, what type of things are you finding the need to filter out/remove the most?
Not too much, actually. People hanging up without a message are the most common. There are also a few people that have played recordings of songs or other sound clips from copyrighted sources, and I don't want to deal with that mess if I don't have to. There are also the ones that are in other languages that I can't put a good memo on or moderate properly. I keep them all and just leave the ones that I don't post marked as "unpublished" in my static site builder (Jekyll) so that I can take another pass at them later when I have the time / resources.
Very few have been "inappropriate". There was one with some questionable jokes that I held back and another where someone was quite angrily talking about a particular political party (there are other "political" statements I've allowed; I just don't want to the page to become some place for people to yell at each other -- not going for that vibe).
@unixispower , you might consider adding the site to TheOldNet webring ( https://webring.theoldnet.com/submit ). I have discovered it from a yesterday post about ucanet (a DNS for retro site). Your site would be an excellent ring member!
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.
Are you manually creating the memo? Or are you using something like whisper for transcription and then extracting the first few words, or maybe using an LLM to write the memo?
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.
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...
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.
I found them to be good for terminating Canada and US calls but the international routes sound like crap (barely intelligible) even with premium routing. I would recommend them if you’re calling numbers outside these countries.
I also don’t think they can be depended on for business. They’ve probably learnt a lot from their ddos a couple years ago but they were down for weeks as a result. As a customer you couldn’t place calls for the entire duration.
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.
Also not op, and nothing against any other provider, but callcentric is another provider that has been around probably 2 decades now and has never let me down. Basically everything is a la carte and cheap.
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.
On the telephone network it was probably µ-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. (µ-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... µ/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.
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.
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).
