I really hate my answering machine. It’s the type of device you can’t really try out in the store and you have no idea how well it will work until you get it home.

Ours has a particularly bad interface for indicating when it has messages – it flashes a light. The light flashes faster when there are new messages, but I can never remember how fast that is, so I can’t tell if I have new messages or not.

It’s digital and has this really annoying voice that speaks 3 complete sentences before it actually starts playing the messages. To delete a message, you hit the delete button while the message is playing. Unfortunately, there is no confirmation given when you’ve deleted a message. If you hit delete when no message is playing, it deletes all the mesages, making it interesting when trying to delete the last message.

I don’t really want to buy another answering machine because I hate the device to begin with. I can never remember how to listen to my messages remotely or what the magic keys are to replay or delete a message from my phone.

The problem is the very limited interface of this throwaway device. What I want instead is a system that uses interfaces I’m familar with and use every day, like email and the web.

I want a service (or program I can run on my Mac at home) that will take my calls, record them, and then email them to me. Yes, email. Send me a little sound file that I can listen to whenever I want and speed up or slow down. I can save them just like email.

The email would also be accompanied by a website where I could browse messages, review callerID history. I would also be able to browse this site on my Treo instead of messing around with trying to translate phone digits into commands.

This may be asking too much, but it would be nice of the system could actually use voice recognition to translate the message into text. After all, I can read a lot faster than I can listen and some people tend to ramble. I hate trying to write down phone numbers from messages though. Something in my brain doesn’t quite work right and I can’t remember 7 numbers long enough to write them down.

When I worked at Microsoft, I tested a system that would email your messages to you. It was really cool. That was 5 years ago. Surely this is possible now.

I’m looking at VOCP, but I’m doubtful that I’ll be able to get it to work on my G4. PhoneValet is in the right direction, but doesn’t answer calls. Plus, I don’t think the built-in modem is caller-id or voice-capable. Damn. I once bought a Supra Voice-capable modem specifically to try to kill my answering machine, but I don’t think I ever got it working.

Hi Apple, in your quest to create the ultimate media hub, how about creating iPhone? You’ve added builtin faxing into Panther, it should be easy, right? You could integrate it in with the whole iLife suite – AddressBook is a no brainer, but you could do other cool things like Dial-a-Song with iTunes and Macintalk. Please?