One time, at a gathering, someone told me that, years previously, they'd helped write a computer program which could distinguish between an answering machine message and an actual person on the phone.
Basically, in the great majority of cases, someone picking up the phone says, "Hello?" in a rising tone of voice.
An answering machine message, on the other hand, may start with "Hello," but, if it does, it is almost invariably in a falling or flat tone. "Hello. You have reached blah blah blah."
So, this program would note whether it was a rising or falling or flat "hello."
Soon after he did his work, he got a phone call, said, "Hello?" and heard the phone click over to a phone bank, where a telemarketer of some stripe started talking to him.
It is for this reason that I never answer the phone, "Hello?"
Rather, I say, "Ian here," or "Osmond-Riba residence."
That's, first, more useful to people calling me, since they that way know they've gotten the right phone number, and possibly even which one of us they're talking to.
But more importantly, it screws with that phone bank program. A fair chunk of telemarketing calls just plain don't get through to me, because of how I answer the phone.
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