PhoneValet Message Center

» see parliant.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

PhoneValet needed two things I never had in the years it was on sale: a Mac, and a reason to want a computer answering the house phone. Through the dial-up stretch the landline at home in Turkey had one job in my life, which was carrying the modem, and the idea of software managing that same line sounded, at the time, like a way to lose the connection. Mac share here was somewhere near zero. This was a product for an American home office with a second line and a reason to keep records of who called.

Parliant Corporation sold it as a combination of software and a hardware device, which is the detail that explains most of the product's history. A Mac on its own cannot hear a telephone line. The box was what made the Mac a participant, and when PhoneValet gained a capability over the following eight years it was usually because new hardware had shipped underneath it.

The first version shipped on 23 July 2003 and did not answer anything. It kept a list of calls in and out, logging the number against the start and end times, with room to type a note beside each one. It popped up a window when somebody rang, using Caller ID, and spoke the caller's name aloud by looking it up in an address book you maintained yourself. It would also dial for you, working out the long distance and calling card codes on its own. What it could not do was pick up, because the hardware of that first release had no way to take the line off-hook.

~ the record ~

~ the box that could finally pick up ~

On 30 June 2004 Parliant released version 2.0 and added the Message Center name. The new hardware could answer the telephone, which folded voicemail into the call history that version 1.0 had been building, so messages and call records lived in the same place. The device also had automatic gain control, which meant it could make a clean recording of both halves of a conversation rather than a loud side and a faint one. Later 2.x releases let you dial in from elsewhere to check messages, and let you listen to a voicemail in real time while it was being left.

~ the podcast bundle ~

Version 3.0 came on 11 July 2005 with two extensions announced the same day. PhoneValet Anywhere put the main functions behind a web interface, so the call history was reachable from a browser somewhere else. PhoneValet PodCast was aimed squarely at the 2005 podcasting boom and the problem of recording a telephone interview that did not sound like a telephone interview: it bundled BIAS SoundSoap for scrubbing noise out of the recording and Peak Express for cutting it up afterwards. The core 3.0 update added call blocking and greetings tied to individual callers.

Version 4.0 followed on 17 March 2006, a free upgrade, and its headline feature was recording every call automatically instead of waiting to be told. That was the last version Parliant ever shipped. PhoneValet stayed on sale for five more years without another release number.

~ what is on the domain now ~

The product was discontinued in May 2011 and technical support ran on until June 2012, which is a more generous wind-down than most small software companies manage. No reason was published for either date.

parliant.com still resolves. What it serves is a 2.7 KB page carrying a four-dot loading animation over a line of Chinese text offering ICP filing lookups, with a script underneath that reloads the whole thing every 1.5 seconds. The domain has been swept into the recycling trade and left spinning. Somewhere underneath all of it is the fact that answering machines stopped being something you bought hardware for, first because the phone company gave it to you free, and then because the phone came off the wall entirely.

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