How Digital Answering Machines Work

Today, most answering machines are digital, and use the same technology as a CD or MP3 player. Learn more about digital answering machines in this HowStuffWorks podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to brain Stuff from how Stuff Works dot com
where smart Happens, Hi Marshall Brain. It used to be
that answering machines all used tapes, and some still do,
but today most answering machines are digital. They use the
same kind of technology that a CD or MP three
player uses. The first step in the process is an

(00:21):
analog to digital converter. This device samples the voice maybe
eight thousand times per second, and gives a digital value
to the intensity of each sample. A micro controller stores
all the samples in low power RAM or flash memory.
So let's say that a caller leaves a ten second
message that might translate into eighty thousand bytes of digitized data.

(00:44):
Those bites are stored at a specific address in RAM.
To play the message back, the micro controller reads the
eighty thousand bites from RAM and plays them through a
digital to analog converter. RAM or flash memory is a
high speed memory device, so the micro controller can erase
one of the messages, it can easily move the other
messages forward into the freed up space, or it can

(01:07):
store a new message in the blank space. Do you
have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast? If so,
Please send me an email at podcast at how stuff
works dot com. For more on this and thousands of
other topics, go to how stuff works dot com.