OvoLab Phlink Phone Information System Mac :: Education by Design Store

Editorial Review
The Ovolab Telephone Adapter is a small USB device which plugs into one of your Mac's USB ports on one side, and to an analog telephone cable on the other side.Using the Telephone Adapter, Ovolab Phlink can interface with the telephone line. It also recognizes Caller ID if such service is available from your telephone company. The Ovolab Telephone Adapter also works with Vonage devices and other IP-based services which provide an analog telephone connection. Ovolab Phlink, combined with the Ovolab Telephone Adapter, can answer telephone calls and identify the caller using Caller ID and Apple's Address Book. After answering a call, Ovolab Phlink records a message and stores it on your Mac for later retrieval. Ovolab Phlink lets you label and write your own notes next to each call, as well as sort and search through them. Phlink is not limited to playing prerecorded messages. You can run any AppleScript, or launch any application, by pressing keys on your telephone's keypad. Take a video snapshot and send it by email, turn filesharing on or off, restart a server. The possibilities are endless. Scripts can also send audio feedback to the caller by speaking text using Mac OS X's speech synthesis in addition to playing back prerecorded sounds. Ovolab Phlink can encode messages at extremely low bitrates and send themas email attachments to any address you specify. Create fully automated tone-driven menus Share a single line for fax and voice calls Integrates with pagesender for receiving faxes on your Mac Create scripts that look up information on the Internet Trigger actions based on who is calling Log incoming calls based on caller ID information Schedule activation and greetings based on the time of the day Speech synthesis to provide feedback to the caller Address Book to identify known callers AppleScript for automating actions QuickTime to compress and store recordings Rendezvous to automati
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Customer Reviews

Defective, poor customer service - AVOID

2007-10-25
This product is useless. There are problems with the software that prevent it from working with a MacPro and possibly other machines. The product answers calls for a few hours or days and then locks up and stops working. At times it even grabs your phone line and keeps it busy for hours. The company maintains no staff of technical support people to help. It took me three weeks to get an acknowledgment of the problem from the company and then for 3 more weeks no one has gotten back to me after repeated attempts. I still have not gotten a refund and the product is completely useless. AVOID!

Interesting, but Not for the average user!

2007-01-27
All this product really does straight out of the box is answer calls, take messages and emails them somewhere. everything else is done by using scripts and you putting together files and folders in a very specific way to the program to understand what you want it to do. now, if you are a apple script programmer this gizmo might be very powerful as you can make it to almost anything, but if you just expect it to come with a nice interface to do this, look elsewhere (phonevalet). i tried the included voice mailbox setup program several times and could not get it to jump to the appropriae mailbox, nor would it recognize the pin code and jump to the main menu. this is such basic functionality that the fact i could not get this to work in half a day (and i am a it guy) made me return it.

agree with last reviewer

2006-09-05
I downloaded the software to see how set up was and found that, while it is powerful software, it is a nightmare to set up. I don't want to learn programming (applescript) in order to have a business phone system. I want to buy a car, not a kit car with assembly (and some fabrication!) required! If you want to make a career out of setting up a voicemail system this software/hardware this appears to be the product for you! I have ordered a competing product, Phonevalet, and plan to write a review on that product. (they do not offer a download to take a look at the software but they do offer a 30 day moneyback guarantee) I hope this helps you.

Solid product, great support, amazing depth of features

2006-07-15
I've been using a Mac for my voicemail since my Performa 6320, and Phlink is the best Mac voicemail product ever. I have it running on an old 600MHz iBook and it works great. The basic functionality (like sending yourself emails of the recordings) is simple to set up, and for advanced users the AppleScript ability is awesome. By using a simple folder hierarchy, you can create unlimited mailboxes and voice trees for companies. The documentation is good and easy to understand.

Some third-party products -- like Indigo home automation software -- are already set up to tie in to Phlink and come with ready-made AppleScripts that you just need to drop in the appropriate folder.

The one time I had a problem (a fried telephone adapter, which which was my own fault) Ovolab's tech support was prompt, helpful, and friendly.

What I love about this product:

* Getting emails at work of voicemails left at home
* Having custom outgoing messages based upon caller ID info (great for annoying telemarketers!)
* Getting pop-up alerts on other Macs on my network telling me who's calling
* Integrating with Indigo so I can call home and turn lights on and off

this is hard

2006-01-02
So I've been tinkering with this for a few hours now, and I have to say I was disappointed by how much of the cool functionality appears to be dependent on the user's knowledge of AppleScript. I'm a fairly technical person, but I don't have a lot of confidence when it comes to tweaking or merging applescripts. This is way over my head, and I've been using a Mac since 1984.