For fear that people might not understand, I felt forced to leave a greeting that asked people to press “the key to the right of the zero that looks a bit like a noughts and crosses board.”Both systems, however, raised a bigger issue. Having ruled out voice-mail at home, I decided to install it at my desk at the Independent – but then chickened out. BitFax does; to leave a message in a mailbox, you have to key in the number (“press five for Fred”), and then “pounds “. The trouble is that some people in Britain call “pounds ” “hash”, while others call it “gate”.Americans call it “pound”.

Although its documentation is inferior, SuperVoice also has one advantage that may be crucial on this side of the Atlantic: it doesn’t require callers to use the “pounds ” key on their telephones. It allows fax-on-demand, while BitFax does not, and sorts messages into up to 99 different mailboxes, compared with BitFax’s nine. It also displays the number of messages received when it is minimised to anicon at the bottom of the screen.Both programs are sold through computer stores and mail order, though SuperVoice came bundled in as a free extra with a modem I was lent by Solwise, a mail-order company that offers cheap modems SuperVoice is more powerful but cheaper. BitFax uses VCR-style buttons on the screen to allow you to play, fast forward, rewind and stop messages easily.SuperVoice is better still: it has an easy-to-understand display, with numbers showing how many voice, fax and data messages have been received since the system was last checked. The packages I tried, BitFax and SuperVoice, were both tolerably easy to set up under Windows. The setting-up is a process of deciding on a main greeting, then allocating different boxes to different numbers, assigning greetings to each of them, and deciding which will take messages and how. Not only do you have to leave your PC on all the time to take messages; you also face the risk that the machine might crash while you are out, screwing up your fax and phone at one stroke.That said, the systems are fun to use.

Nor can it produce a ring on the extension to which it is linked. If a caller wants to talk to you directly, the software just beeps and flashes a message on your computer telling you to pick up the phone.There are also doubts about entrusting your telephone to a computer that runs Windows, as both the software packages I tried require. Without specialist hardware that enables the computer truly to take control of the phone system, the software available on the PC cannot do any of the basic things that an office switch can It cannot forward a call from one extension to another. When they find one, it will probably be people who work from home and want to maintain some separation between their working and their home lives.

An added bonus is that voice-mail allows small businesses to sound to the casual ear much larger than they really are.But there are disadvantages. The software can sort messages into different “mailboxes” for different people or different purposes, so you can listen to those you want to, and ignore the rest bleep you or call you on another telephone number if an urgent message comes in read out information, such as youraddress or a list of train timetables send out information by fax to people who ask for it, while they are still on the line calling you.If none of these things sounds useful at home, that is probably because PC-based voice-mail systems are still in search of a market. It can also: save you from investing in a second phone line and a fax machine. The software can pick up the phone and deal with whatever comes in – whether a voice, fax or computer file save you from having to listen to a dozen calls from your kid’s friends in order to find out whether that crucial business contact rang. If you were planning to buy an answering machine, voice-mail can thus save money.

But why have voice-mail when you have only one phone number at home?One answer is cost. If you have a PC, the only equipment needed is a fast modem, costing from £80, which can deal with voice as well as data and fax. Voice-mail can do all the tricks of the fanciest answering machines. You can listen to messages from elsewhere, switch answering mode on and off, and change the outgoing greeting. They know that big firms, especially in the US, use voice-mail as a cheaper alternative to buying everyone their own answering machine. Then comes mass marketing, when the product is taken so much for granted that you can even buy it in John Lewis (as with answering machines).
Home voice-mail is still at the incomprehension stage; most people don’t understand the point of it. Then comes the stage when normal people begin to realise that the technology might be useful (as with mobile phones).