A personal assistant without cost: Home Office Voice Mail routes calls, faxes, e-mail and more, without a weekly salary.

Home Office Voice Mail routes calls, faxes, e-mail and more, without a weekly salary

Ever wished you could afford to hire an assistant for your home office? Now you can. With American Network Systems' Home Office Voice Mail, small and home office businesses with two or more phone lines can make like the "big boys." For under $200, Home Office Voice Mail lets you run your telephone through your PC to eliminate the single-line bottleneck that occurs when you try to run a phone, fax and Internet connection out of your home office simultaneously. More importantly, this software and hardware package is easy to install and use.

Home Office Voice Mail automates Internet activities such as sending Internet e-mail, leaving Internet Voice Mail, or checking your Internet mailbox. Auto-Connect will "wake up" the modem to dial an Internet service provider, log on to the Internet, execute the necessary Internet action, log off and disconnect automatically so that users do not have to be present to send communications. Internet voice mail lets you send a voice message to anyone with an e-mail address, whether or not they have Home Office Voice Mail.

The product can also act as an answering machine or a voice mail box. Whether answered manually or via Home Office Voice Mail, it can transfer callers into one of 20 previously created Auto-Attendant mailboxes. This addition creates a Voice Mail system comparable to the ones that support larger businesses. Even more useful is Home Office Voice Mail's RSVP Calling. It enables the PC to dial one or more telephone numbers, play a recorded message and retrieve a verbal response from the caller. This response can then be forwarded to a phone, pager or Internet e-mail address.

Home Office Voice Mail also keeps caller records including contact information (when used with Caller ID), date and time stamp and personal notes for each phone call. Data from the program can also be transferred to other contact managers such as Goldmine and ACT! For the fledgling small-business, it's a device that is well worth the price.

To run Home Office Voice Mail, users need a personal computer with a Pentium 60 or faster processor, Windows 95 operating system, 8 MB of RAM, 4 MB of free hard disk space, a 3.5-inch high-density drive, a free ISA bus slot, an analog telephone line, a modem or other Internet connection and a Microsoft-compatible mouse. Total Home Office Voice Mail is available at retail outlets or from American Network Systems at 888-839-8898 or www.americannetwork.com.

Retail price: $199.