With PhoneValet's call announcement features you'll always have appropriate information about the caller before you answer the phone. These features are based on the information provided by your telephone line supplier's Caller ID service.

When a call is received, PhoneValet can display on-screen the caller's name and number as well as the incoming line information. This generally occurs before the third ring. PhoneValet's on-screen announcements are available in five different sizes: from the largest type, which can be read from across a room, to smaller type that doesn't interfere with your work.

As well as the on-screen announcement, PhoneValet can provide a spoken announcement (Talking Caller ID). Unlike some systems, PhoneValet does not require that you record yourself saying the names of callers. Instead, PhoneValet uses speech synthesis to speak the name of the caller through your Mac's speakers and audio output. This means even first-time callers are announced by your Mac. For example, "Call from George Butler Plumbing on line 2".

Customizing Callers' Names
There are several cases in which the Caller ID information may not be exactly what you want announced. Example:

• Calls from a personal contact such as a husband or wife.


• Calls from a person whose name has an unusual pronunciation.


• Calls in which the telephone company provides an incorrect, truncated or abbreviated name through Caller ID (e.g. MCDNLDS RSTRT).


• Calls received from rural areas, wireless phone calls and long-distance numbers that sometimes have number information without a name provided. In these cases PhoneValet generally announces the call as "out of area".

It's simple to provide PhoneValet with the correct information in these cases. When a call is received, PhoneValet first checks the telephone number provided by Caller ID in your PhoneValet phonebook. If an entry is found, then the name stored in your telephone book is announced, overriding the name provided by Caller ID. Thus your spouses cell phone number — likely in your phonebook for easy dialing with PhoneValet's voice dialing — would be correctly announced when they call in.

In the case of names that are pronounced unusually, PhoneValet provides a "sounds like" field for each entry in the phonebook. This field allows you to specify a phonetic pronunciation for the name. In this way the on-screen announcement is spelled correctly, and the name is announced correctly. As a bonus, this feature also notifies PhoneValet's voice dialing features to expect this pronunciation of the name. screenshot

Adding a name to the phonebook is as simple as selecting the call in the call log, then clicking the "add to phonebook" button.

Who Is That? Also Speak to the Rescue!
Have you ever received a call "out of the blue" from someone who acts like your long lost buddy but you cant make the connection and are too embarrassed to admit it, at least for a couple of painful seconds?

This need not happen again. You can choose to add also speak information to any phonebook record. This information will be spoken aloud during the caller announcement. It is also useful for family members who are now prompted, "Call from Andrea Botko, Dads Boss, on line 3".

Announcements When You Want Them
Some people prefer that spoken announcements not be made at certain times of the day. This is particularly true for those who have a home office and prefer that calls not be announced aloud in the evening.

PhoneValet allows you to set a schedule (which can be different for each day of the week) to control when spoken announcements will be made. On-screen announcements (if you have not disabled them) continue to be displayed 24 hours a day. Many people turn off the ringer on their phone and rely entirely on PhoneValet announcements. Now that rude late-night call goes directly to voicemail without you even hearing a ring.

AppleScript Plug-ins for Call Announcement
Want to take call announcement to the next level? It's easy to configure PhoneValet to run AppleScripts, when Caller ID information is received. We provide example scripts that open your caller's record in Now Contact, for example, or perform a reverse lookup of the caller's number using the Internet. For those advanced users who enjoy writing AppleScripts, it's easy to have the Caller ID information from PhoneValet cause any number of actions — looking up related client information in Filemaker databases for example.

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