Regarding the mystery telephone gadget that "Bellsouth Baboon" found
(Letters,  Spring 94, p31),  what he found is called a "predictive
"dialer", one of the telemarkerers favorite toys. Its intent is to keep
the teleslime talking,  without wasting their time dialing, listening to
ringing,  answering machines etc etc.  What you feed it is a list of
numbers,  or it will try every number in a given range.  It "knows" that
some percentage will be useless calls,  so it does a bunch of calls at
the same time.  They will recognize a modem or fax and hang up,  marking
that as an NG line.  RNA (Ring No Answer) numbers are also marked for
retry later.  It does voice recognition for "hello" and a few other
possibilities and can usually discriminate between an answering machine
and a human.  

When it finds a "live one",  it transfers the call to the next available
teleslime,  popping up info about the call (number, name etc) on a
screen in front of the teleslime.  If it gets a bit too far ahead,  it
will drop calls that are ringing and haven't answered yet,  marking them
for retry.  It uses its statistics for length of calls and percentage of
live answers to predict how far ahead it should be getting.


          Rich in L.A. (Rich Greenberg, N6LRT)