PacBell to Offer Voice-Mail Service for Business Clients

Pacific Bell said Monday that it is beginning to offer voice-mail messaging service to its medium-to-large business telephone customers--and will soon test a similar service for small businesses and residential customers in San Pedro and the Silicon Valley town of Milpitas.

The new business service will initially be available only to the company’s business customers served by Centrex switching equipment. But it is expected to be available throughout California by 1990, according to Heidi Harris, director of voice-mail services.

A Variety of Services

Voice mail enables callers to send, receive and store messages in the sender’s own voice. The system requires customers to use “Touch-Tone” push-button phones, but no additional equipment is needed by senders or receivers. Instead, the messages are stored in electronic “mailboxes” maintained for the customers within Pacific Bell’s network through equipment furnished by Digital Sound Corp., a Santa Barbara-based company that designs, manufactures and markets voice-technology products.

Harris said Pacific Bell plans to introduce a variety of related information services that will eventually allow both business and residential customers to send and receive messages and information using telephones and computer terminals.

Pacific Bell’s entry into the voice-mail market was made possible last March when a federal court in Washington loosened restrictions limiting the kinds of electronic services that the former Bell phone companies can offer. The court presides over the antitrust settlement that divested American Telephone & Telegraph of its local phone operations, which in 1984 were placed in seven regional holding companies, including Pacific Bell’s parent, Pacific Telesis Group in San Francisco.