Ovolab Phlink turns your Mac into a powerful answering machine and telephone information center.

Widely used in the home, home office and in businesses, Ovolab Phlink greets callers with personalized greetings, plays caller-specific ringtones, forwards voicemail messages by email, logs incoming and outgoing calls, and much more.

Ovolab Phlink can sort messages into multiple voice mailboxes, and email them to predefined email addresses - encoded in a highly-compressed format such as AAC or 3GPP (the latter can turn a one-minute message into a small, 60KB attachment). Your voicemail will reach you, anywhere in the world, by email!

You can set up Ovolab Phlink to provide information to the caller, either through prerecorded audio messages or by using Mac OS X's speech synthesis.
As an example, Ovolab Phlink can look up weather forecasts on the Internet and read them to the caller, or restart a server, and much more - thanks to the power of AppleScript and Ovolab technology.

With Ovolab Phlink, you can create phone trees that callers navigate using their telephone's keypad.

Phlink is also essential in the office, where it can announce callers and pop up dynamic information about the caller every time the phone rings, by looking it up in a database or online.

In terms of disability uses, Phlink is similar to the PhoneValet system that I wrote about recently. The major differences that I'm aware of between the two is that Phlink is more powerful and extensible if you have complex needs, but PhoneValet is easier to set up and use.

- Ricky Buchanan

PhoneValet revolutionizes the way your busy home or small office uses the telephone. Keep using your existing standard lines and phones and enjoy features usually found only on expensive telephone switches. It's so affordable, easy to install and powerful that some small businesses get a Mac just to take advantage of it!

PhoneValet includes software and hardware, and has over 50 valuable features.
[...]

1. PhoneValet identifies callers & the right person answers
2. Voice mail & Auto-attendant: A professional image 24x7
3. Build corporate memory: Call recordings and call history
4. Accurate and powerful dialing

Actually, that blurb is not a very good description of how PhoneValet can be useful for people with disabilities because their website focusses more on use by small businesses. I use PhoneValet myself and these are some of the things that I find helpful:

• It lets me dial numbers from my Address Book or any number that's on a web page or in an email, etc., and automatically fixes up the area codes and so on for my location.
• It recognises Caller ID and looks up phone numbers in my OS X Address Book to get names, then gives me the information visually or with the text-to-speech.
• It works as an answering machine and records voicemail then emails me the messages so I don't forget about them.
• I can set it to do different things with calls according to the caller ID, for example send certain numbers straight to voicemail without bothering me, and give different voicemail options to different callers, and so on.
• It can do different things at different times of day - I have set mine up to never audibly announce anything after 11pm, and send calls right to voicemail except for a few people that I know will only call me late in an emergency.
• When I pick up the phone, it automatically pauses iTunes so I don't have to scramble to pause it so I can hear.
• I can ask it to record all calls to/from certain numbers, or manually get it record a call I'm currently on. I use that part to "take notes" because trying to remember or type information and listen at the same time is not something I can manage.
• It does faxes as well as voice calls.
• The call log helps me remember whether I've done something or not.
• On days when I'm too ill to speak on the phone, I change the voicemail recording (It's easy to switch between recordings) so people know that I am here and listening and just can't speak.

There are probably more things I can't remember, it just does so many things! I have used PhoneValet for several years and their support people have been very helpful even though Australia isn't officially on the list of countries that PhoneValet supports.

- Ricky Buchanan