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Home TeleVoice Is a

Stand-Alone System That

Turns One Phone Line

into 25 Mailboxes

"Hello. You've reached Ersatz International, the world leader in business consulting services. For sales and marketing, press 1. To order Ersatz publications, press 2. To hear a recording of business tips from CEO Ben Bogus, press 3. To send a fax, press 4. And to leave a message for anyone on the Ersatz staff, press 5."

Sound familiar? Voice-mail messages greet thousands of business callers every day. Market researchers say U.S. businesses will spend close to $1 billion this year for voice-mail systems.

Though criticized for being somewhat impersonal, voice-mail systems are hard to beat for efficiency and dependability. Besides routing calls to different extensions--which answering machines can't do--they capture every message accurately, work round the clock, and don't take vacations.

Voice mail can work just as hard for a small, home-based business as it does for a sprawling office complex. Ersatz International could be a big outfit in a glass tower downtown or a one-person operation in a basement office, but you'd never guess by the way its phone is answered.

Until recently, a sophisticated voice-mail system was too expensive and too elaborate to be practical for a home office. Prices for most stand-alone systems start at about $3,000; those that sell for $500 require a dedicated computer.

But a new system called Home TeleVoice, introduced at last winter's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, is designed to appeal to home and small-business customers. With a list price of $750, the system offers the features of voice-mail systems that cost three times as much. And it's a stand-alone product that doesn't require a dedicated computer.

Although Home TeleVoice costs more than some single-line voice-mail circuit cards for MS-DOS computers, it can be an attractive alternative. Some computer cards, such as the Bigmouth system (Talking Technology; $295), require a dedicated computer. That can bump the price of the entire package up to more than $1,000, not to mention the demand for desk space.

Even cards that can operate in the background, such as The Complete Communicator (The Complete PC; $495), will gobble up a sizable chunk of hard-disk storage. A system with four mailboxes consumes from 6- to 16MB of disk space.

# posted by Medical Information : 4:02 AM