We are on AT&T and our greatly extended family uses "0" to successfully get directly to the beep.

@TehQ: It costs to check your VM's unless you do it during your weekend or night-time free calling. This is not a mobile to mobile call.

If I remember correctly, for a time AT&T did do the forcingyou to listen to the whole message crap, but, thank goodness, they stopped that quite a while ago.

I'm always surprised when someone complains about this. When I tell them and they try it and it WORKS, they are so grateful.

I realize that a lot of this is simply because there hadn't been a critical mass of people with email-capable phones. But what I don't get is why email wasn't used from the get-go when it was decided to add messaging to phones. Adding a system like SMS just creates two mutually incompatible systems for little reason (although they can be bridged together), and an inferior one at that. Now there is little reason ANY phone capable of sending SMS (basically all of them) should not use email instead, except as a money-grubbing scam by the carriers.

I had a friend meet a guy in a bar once who got her phone number and proceeded to text her. she responded suggesting she wasn't a fan of texts and that perhaps he should call. His response? A text saying ok...He never called, and she never lost any sleep.

And isn't the 'missed call' notification on the phone the same thing as a page anyway?

All representatives are currently assisting other customers. At this time, our average wait is 1 minutes and you are # 1 Thank you for your patience. A representative will be with you shortly.
Welcome to AT&T Technical Support Chat. My name is 'Wanda Reese' and I'll be happy to assist you today.
Me: Hello - How can I turn OFF the pre-recorded voicemail instructions on our cell phones so I get a beep immediately after my personal recorded message? I understand iPhone users have this with AT&T so I know it is possible.
Wanda Reese: I will be more than happy to assist you, Mr. Me.
Me: thank you
Me: It is a relief that you will assist me to turn this feature OFF
Me: Wanda - it has been a few minutes - are you still there?
Wanda Reese: Mr. Me, please hold with me for 2 to 3 minutes while I check the device tutorial for that information.
Me: ok - thank you
Wanda Reese: Mr. Me,which Razr do you have?
Me: Motorola Razr - we have 2
Wanda Reese: The iPhone has many options that are not available with other phone.
Wanda Reese: Our voice mail platform requires the voice mail prompts be in place for your voice mail.
Me: Well this isn't a phone option - this is a voicemail option which I imagine would be based on your voicemail features NOT the phone itself
Me: Why is that?
Wanda Reese: [www.wireless.att.com] ...
Wanda Reese: Please open the link from your PC. This is a device guide to show you all options to use with your phone.
Me: What is the reason the instructions are repeated each time someone calls?
Me: Is there a hotkey to skip it?
Wanda Reese: For other options that you may need with the device. Please contact Motorola by calling 866-289-6686. Their hours of operation are Mon - Fri 8 AM - 11PM Sat and Sun 10 AM - PM ET.
Me: This is an AT&T issue - not a Physical Phone issue
Me: Is there a skip feature?
Me: so callers do not need to listen to this same 15 second message every time they leave me a message?
Wanda Reese: We do not have a skip feature for the voice mail prompts. I do apologize, Mr. Me.
Me: Why do iPhone users have it but others do not?
Wanda Reese: Yes, I do understand. Thank you.
Wanda Reese: Mr. Me, have you been able to open the device guide?
Me: Yes - it is NOT a Phone Device issue - it is 100% an AT&T issue -
Me: Just to Clarify - You CANNOT Disable the Voicemail Instructions for my AT&T Cell Phone Family Plan?
Wanda Reese: That is correct. the device guide would allow you to view other phone option. Our systems do not skip the voice mail routing, message.
Me: But the iPhone does
Me: Are you saying that the iPhone has special features in the phone that will allow me to skip these instructions?
Me: Are you still there?

Timed-Out

OMG I would switch carriers if Sprint did this. My mom fills up my voicemail with "Answer your phone, call me back!" type messages, & I would commit suicide if I had to listen to them all.

I HATE the telemarketer/bill collector calls. I get those messages all the time. Someone with a lot of trouble had my number before I did, and I'm always getting calls from 800 numbers & long voicemails meant for her.

"*garbled robot voice* This is a message for so & so. If you are not so & so, please hang up now.............. By staying on the line, you agree that you are so & so. We need to speak with you about an urgent business matter. Please call us back at X-XXX-XXX-XXXX."

UGH. This is why I will only give out my google voice number from now on.

I do feel much better now that I've vented and know how to skip it. Now I won't have to yell at my friends voicemail when I must leave him a message. He's a technician and is too stupid or lazy to turn that thing off. "hey sprint uses faxes." "I know that, but do you ever use it?!?!?!!!?"

@johnva: The only reason that I can think is that there is a potential for brief delay in receiving the message as it moves through the E-mail servers. Add the fact that you may need special hardware (or G-mail Push on the iPhone) to have the E-mails pushed to your phone like a text message (so you are actually notified when the message is received).

E-mail on phones is fairly new (or at lest it is now becoming very usable on a phone), think back a couple years ago when most people did not have smart phones therefore E-mail was difficult, now smart phones are the norm. The only advantage that I can see is SMS messages MUST be short, so you don't get people rambling on and on and on.

will this work with provider based voicemail?

Will this also work for carrier based voicemail on landlines?

@JustinSane07: I have to call out crews reguarly, I can spend 45 min calling one list, since most have multiple numbers. If I can cut that down, eveny by a few seconds per call, it will save me a lot of time each list.

Wait, your name is Dallas May too?!

@johnva: I am with you. I as well do not have a text messaging service, and will tell the few friends that do TM me that I do not use TM and will not read it. I have E-mail access on my phone, or if you really want to communicate with me...call me. I find it easier to call my wife and ask her what she wants to do for dinner, or when she thinks she might be home. One conversation, no constant back & forth, and with a hands free, you can do it in a car while driving and it is much safer than SMS.

@emis: It matters a whole lot when I had to make a $1.99/min call to my gf in DC from the Bahamas last night. It was the fastest "I'm sorry you haven't heard from me but there's no CDMA signal on this part of the island nor is there internet in this house and the next time you'll hear from me is when I'm in the office tomorrow morning" voicemail I've ever had to leave.

@zentec: Yeah, I feel your pain too. Depending on who calls me and when, I'll either wait until 9pm to check voicemail or do it right away if it's someone I deem is important enough. Or if I am at home, I'll use my VOIP phone to call my voicemail system, since the VOIP account has unlimited minutes all the time.

@JustinSane07: Yeah, David Pogue is starved for attention.

@Murph1908: You better be nice to her. She might become self-aware and become our boss some day.

@jokono: after owning a RAZR, i will never buy a motorola ever again.

i should have learned with star-tac.

@henrygates: like you've never had a "hey, it's me...." message before....

i agree that better message leaving skills are in order.

don't get me wrong, there are a handful of people i know by voice instantly, but there's a metric shit-ton of people who i can't recognize by voice alone unless i listen to the message multiple times to try to figure it out.

SMS pricing is a joke. I'm one of those people who refuses to "text", because I've yet to encounter many situations where I can't just email or call faster. And so I don't have a text messaging plan. Yet AT&T has quadrupled the price of pay-per use text messages (which I occasionally have to pay due to other people texting me), AND eliminated mobile-to-mobile text messaging (meaning you have to pay TWICE for the same text message if it's between two phones on the same family plan). $0.40/SMS is absolutely obscene.

I wish everyone would/could do that.

The truth is, for all those people who buy extra plans at $20 per month so they can have unlimited texts, the cost may be $1300 per MB or more! But, for those who have certain carriers and certain plans that include unlimited texts for free, the cost per MB is zero.

Exactly! I don't even remember why I even sat through all that, but it was when I set up the initial greeting when I switched to Sprint.

Yeah I'm with you. It helps for professional reasons though. The less time before they can leave a message the better in my view.

@lotussix: um, yeah, that is weird. I can't remember the last time I intentionally powered mine down. Use it as a secondary alarm clock in the morning.

I finally ditched the option completely. People who know me know enough to send me a text if I don't answer.

These recordings are designed specifically to push a non-insignificant number of calls over 1 minute so they can collect more money.

Depending on your usage pattern and your willingness to carry a QWERTY phone, a $5 text upgrade could allow you to downgrade your voice plan by $10 to $20.

@Devidence: i could really care less about other people's minutes then! i mean, i almost never go over my minutes.

they don't care about what minutes i use when i leave them voicemails, so why should i care about their's?

On some providers, it very much costs minutes to retrieve your messages using your cell phone. See Verizon. Yet, I can talk to my brother in Florida on his Verizon phone from my home in Michigan for as many minutes as I want, day or night. For no minutes charged to my account.

@wishnias: because sometimes i actually turn my phone OFF. weird, huh?

In this day and age, there is no reason other than profit padding. They can tell down to the micro-second the duration of the call, and in all cases of rounding up (which is all calls), the consumer loses.

@Shappie: yeah, i just turned that back on, thanks!

No, I do not want to page this person, nor do I want to leave a callback number. Just let me leave the damn message you binary bitch.

No, I do not want to page this person, nor do I want to leave a callback number. Just let me leave the damn message you binary bitch.

Why does a voicemail call cost minutes anyway. Isn't it an in network call, and shouldn't that be free?

I think that is something different. You don't want to turn off the stuff it plays when you listen to voicemails, you want to disable the instructions when you call someone elses voicemail. On sprint you can disable this, I don't know about the rest.

@lotussix: and looking at your missed call #'s is so difficult because?...

No problem. On Sprint:

call voicemail
option 3 - personal options
option 2 - greetings
option 1 - change main greeting
option 3 - add/remove caller instructions played after greeting

@Devidence: I did this the day I set up my account with Sprint a few years ago, but then I'm one of those people who like to hear and understand every single option in any configuration menu deal.

I'd venture to guess most of us know the provider by the sounds of the applicable automated voicemail message - but for those who don't, these tips aren't very helpful..but I guess it's the thought that counts :P

@lotussix:

I dunno, I have all the options turned off for people and I still get the phone number. I think there is an option for that as well...

@Ichiro51:

Yea, I have my Sprint phone to go directly to the 'beep' after im done talking on my message. I wish more people I talk to did that too.

i have sprint. the only crappy part about turning the crap off is that i don't get to hear what phone number it came from. so i get "hey, it's me..." and sometimes i'm not sure who "me" is.

NO! I don't want to send a fucking FAX through voicemail! NO! I don't want to page you my number! I don't need other options! WHY THE FUCK DO YOU ASK ME TO SEND A FAX!?!?!? Might as well ask me if I want to send my message through carrier pigeon or morse code! It's a fucking joke and it pisses me off to no end and is why I hate leaving people messages. I absolutely hate it and would gladly go to prison for the rest of my life if I could meet the pricks who "invented" this shit and rip out their tongues.

I always tell people not to even bother leaving me a VM. I look at caller ID to see who it was, and then I call them back. I never listed to the VM messages.

@mizike:
Wow. That would be really annoying.

@outlulz:
You can turn it off with Sprint as well. I don't think that's a good reason to keep doing business with the overpriced AT&T.

I got my invite in less than 2 weeks after asking for one.

I think these voicemail messages are ridiculous--

Anyone who uses their cellphone for work-- it is incredibly inefficient to be playing phone tag and to have to sit through these ong messages when a simple "This is Bob in Sales, push 1 to leave a message" would do.

This is also an example of how the "marketplace" does not self-regulate when it comes to obscene profit.

I don't even leave messages.
I just call, and if I even BEGIN get their message, I just hang up.
Their missed call records will tell them it's me that called, and to call me back.
Doesn't cost any minutes, wastes no one's time, not bugging anyone.

Picked that up from a friend in Lebanon.

I have a couple of AT&T phones for my business. With the iPhones you can turn off the carrier instructions completely, for the other phones they will not allow you to do this.

tim

(I don't know what the voice mail equivalent of making your own soup is. Maybe it's the missed call list...)

Consumerist, please educate your readers instead of driving them into this unnecessary drive.
(P.S. Thanks for the skip commands, that's good posting.)

Why should you have one at all?

@JustinSane07:

Addition not your strong suit? Say you're going to leave a 31 second message. If the outgoing message is 10 seconds, then it matters if the instructions are 5 seconds (5+31+10 = 46 seconds = 1 minute) or 20 seconds (20+31+10 = 61 seconds = 2 minutes).

@zacox: Because text messages are SO much more affordable at $1300/MB. Not everyone purchases a text message plan, so every message you send them costs 10-20 cents vs taking a few minutes to listen to their V-mail.

Text messages are also limited in usefulness as they are ony available cell phone to cell phone (or computer to cell phone using some application or website. If I am calling from a business or using a landline, I have no ability to leave someone a text message explaining why I need to speak with them.

Is this really a complaint? Whether it's 5 seconds, 15 seconds or 59 seconds, it all counts as 1 minute on your minutes. This guy is just bitching about nothing to make himself popular.

Done.

@zacox: [consumerist.com]

My old cell provider wouldn't allow you to delete a message until you had listened to the entire thing. Extremely infuriating. I think hitting 7 (delete) even may have started the message over, or maybe just skipped back a few seconds. The worst were those marathon messages where you had already spoken to the person, rendering the message completely irrelevant, or the times you had to listen to a message over again to write down a phone number or something. Greedy bastards nickel and dimeing me to death. Now I'm with Virgin, much better.

To the person saying that one carrier lets you record your own greeting: All carriers let you record your own greeting, it' just a matter of whether the user sets it or not.

Frankly if you're leaving a short message the 15 seconds doesn't really matter because they charge you by the minute and round up ... so even 20-25 seconds listening to a voice mail greeting doesn't really matter as long as your message is less then ~30 seconds, it all costs 1 minute.

For my voicemail message, I always start with "Press X to skip this message" for the benefit of friends and family so they won't have to remember which network I'm on and which button to push.

It also helps to have a short message, like Agent Casey from Chuck: "Casey. *grunt*".