# voicemail: I disallow receiving phone calls, calls go straight to voicemail
The title says it all: I fed up with phone calls and decided to quit them. To be fair, I didn't receive a lot of them. Maybe one per month. But that was one more than I can take.
Half of it was spammers. Those always make me mad.
The other half is usually my insurance company trying to call me to sell me more stuff or do a survey or renew terms. I'm an expat living in Switzerland. My german, especially the swiss german, is not the best. This is exacerbated by the fact that I'm getting more and more deaf. I often have to ask people around me to repeat their words because I just don't hear well. And this is much worse in the phone: the quality sucks, there's lot of background noise, I hear it only from one ear, and I don't have the visual cues, I can't lipread either. And I can't record the calls on Android, so I can't listen back to the discussion retroactively.
Receiving phone calls from strangers is always stressful for me. I wondered, why do I allow this stress in my life? Then it hit me: I could just set up straight-to-voicemail for the people who insist on calling. No "ring twice then voicemail" nor "voicemail on reject" but straight to voicemail! They can leave me message and I can call them back from a controlled, quiet environment if really needed.
If family wants to call me, then they can call me on whatsapp. I don't get calls from strangers or spammers there. And I have much better control over the potential callers there. It's very easy to start chatting if I'm not in the mood for calls.
# Greeting
My telecom provider allows me to set up a custom greeting message. The default one is quite long and is in german. I decided to record a short one in english to nudge people leave messages in english. Or at least high german instead of swiss german.
I went to https://ttsfree.com/, picked microsoft aria as the voice, set -10% speed adjustment. I then entered this text:
The called user is currently unavailable, please leave a message after the beep.
Result is this:
Only problem: the telecom provider wants me to speak this into my phone to record it, I can't upload an mp3. I didn't find a way to upload an mp3, at least. I'm not a technologically gifted person so I just held my phone to my speaker and blasted the mp3 on it. Worked like a charm.
# Result
Works great. Android has a fancy voicemail integration. When someone leaves a message then I get a notification and can play it back in the phone app. With some operators you also get a transcript, unfortunately I don't have that. Maybe I'll get that eventually and then that will be even cooler. I can then read the message, don't need to listen to them.
I haven't received a single voicemail since I set this up. Not even calls. I wonder if I set it up correctly. Matters not, the point is that I get less calls so I stress less. I don't even have the phone app on my home screen anymore. What could go wrong? \o/
published on 2025-05-19
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