The Invention of Voice
Mail
Voice mail was the brainchild of
Gordon Mathews, a successful entrepreneur who held 35 US
and foreign patents at the time of his death on February
23, 2002.
In the late seventies Matthews began working on the
technology that would eventually be called
"voicemail." In 1979, Matthews took his
technology and formed a company called VMX, which stands
for Voice Message Express. He applied for a patent in 1979
to cover his voicemail invention and sold the first system
to 3M. A few years later, in 1982 the patent for his
invention was awarded. His "Voice Message
Exchange" managed electronic messages in a digital
format. (As a side note: Mathews' wife, Monika,
recorded the first greeting on this first commercial
voicemail.)
Matthews eventually left VMX in 1989. The company had hit
rough financial waters and VMX was later sold to Octel
Communications, which in turn was purchased by Lucent
Technologies and spun off into a new company called Avaya.
To this day, there are companies that still use VMX
systems to meet their voice mail needs.
Voice Mail for the
Masses
For the first few years after voice
mail had been introduced to the world, not many companies
could take advantage of it. The proprietary VMX
systems were very expensive and consequently voice mail
was only available to the largest corporations. The
playing field was leveled with the introduction of
PC-based voice processing boards manufactured by companies
like Dialogic Corporation. Dialogic Communications
Corporation was founded in 1982 and quickly became an
industry leading manufacturer of voice processing
equipment. Their products allowed software
developers to create voice mail software that would work
on industry standard personal computers. This
development significantly lowered the cost to manufacture
a voice mail system and led to an explosive growth of
voicemail.
Today, voice mail has become an integral part of operating
a successful business. Companies large and small
rely on voicemail to efficiently and effectively
communicate with their customers.
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