Telephone Caller ID

[Silverbug]

Hi i had an idea for a program and wanted to know if anyone knew of a way that this might be possible.

What i wanted is basicly a program that answers incomming phone calls, however i want to know if its possible to grab the incomming calls number,(ie the number of the person who rang. like caller id does) then what i wanted to do was to use that number and look up the details of that person in a database and bring their details onto the screen.

any help/idea from ppl with past experience or similar idea would be really great. thanks in advance,

[sail3005]

wow, that sounds really really hard...How are you planning on doing this? Is a phone connected to your computer that has caller ID on it? And, why are you doing it with the web or ASP or soemthing?

[Silverbug]

um, basicly what i want is the computer to answer the incomming call and either take a msg or alert someone to pick up the phone. however when the computer actually answers the phone i want it to go and look up the persons details from the phone number (which get entered in manualy)
sorta like an answering phone service thingy.

[Neomotion]

Yes, it can be done, infact most callcenters work that way. You need to have a database behind it with the caller's info, and then get the info by selecting on their callerid/tlephonenumber.

I do not know how to get the phonenumber (isn't there a component already made for somewhere?), but i know it can be done. Goodluck, and let us know if you succeed. Good luck!

NeoMotion
--------------------
VB 6.0
Almost MCP ;-)
Allround nice guy

[sail3005]

It seems to me like you would need some special hardware to do it....???

[Silverbug]

yeah Neomotion thats what i had planned on doing, but i cant get the phone number either. so thats what i was just asking about it.

yeah i have a funny idea that i might require some hardware, there is a guy in nz that makes the black box's for this (or so i have been told by a friend) im going to try and get some details from him with regards to it.

i did however stumble across some software that sez it can do just what i want it to without the hardware, however being the poor student that i am i cant afford to buy it and see how it works. apartently from what i can gather it only works on a few modems.

i do remember (back in the days) when i programming in qbasic and i made a terminal program (pc to pc) with file upload and txt chatting etc, and how i could have modifyed it to play a wave file down the line instead of sending the data. but ive lost the files for that so i cant base the program on that and also that was dos based and no good for windows.

[Paradox]

If I remember correctly from my phreaking days, caller ID is basically a signal like the one your modem uses to communicate. What you would need to do is write a small driver for your modem to put the modem in raw data mode, and then have the program decode the data stream from the modem. I believe that the caller ID signal is sent for 200ms when the call is picked up, before the 1st ring. I have the full specs somewhere. E-mail me at [email protected]
<Edited in notes>
1) you still need caller ID
2) you don't need any special modem
3) the signal I was speaking of is a standard carrier, and your modem _CAN_ decode it, however, it must be set to RAW mode (usually the default) in order for it to give you the data, or else it'll prob. just give you errors. (note, w/ this, its possible to FAKE a caller ID signal, I'll let you ponder that.)