This answering machine doesn't look like much, no buttons, no interface, not much of anything - in fact, it can look like a lot of things. The reason? It's all voice-activated. It responds to 15 commands that range from "play new" to "set volume" to "tell time". It doesn't require any training sessions typical of voice recognition machines and instead responds to any American-accented english. This is ideal if you have multiple people in your house, you don't need to wait for the voice master to get home before checking messages. The fact that it's so simple makes it easy for anyone to use. And how do you get all of this good stuff started? Simple - just by saying "Answering machine".

The usefulness of this device really depends on how sensitive it is to regional dialects. What if you're from Texas? Or New York? Or Canadian?