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Comment by jareklupinski | Hacker News Reader

I've completely forgotten about the era when anyone could screen their own calls with the equipment they already had, they just needed to figure out "oh I should let _every_ call go to voicemail after one ring and wait to hear who it actually is first"

How did we go backwards? rhetorical question, but can we bring it back with what we currently have?

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I have that on my Pixel phone, if it detects a number that isn't in my contacts, it'll auto-screen the call and provide me with a text transcript of their response. I can see what the person says and choose to answer or let them just continue on to leave a message.

And if it thinks it's actually a spam call, I don't even get it ringing, it just quietly "handles" it (but obviously takes a message so I can call back if it was wrong).

ah, that's neat! on my iphone the only option is to send all calls that aren't in my contacts to voicemail, which is just me saying "please send me a text message"

It feels like we're getting back to that with focus states in iOS and Android, but half my apps still don't tell the API who sent the message and just set the notification title... (and some do but they don't link it to the contact, so the anti-DND rule never goes off)

>How did we go backwards?

By incentivizing smart people to tinker with silly crap instead of work on meaningful problems.

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