Possible?: Voicemail Greetings Customized to Contacts

[NDWalledGarden]

Hey guys, I'm new here. I have an iPhone 4 (my third iphone after the original and the 3G, skipped the 3Gs) that is not unlocked or jailbroken (thus the user name).

Is there any way to customize a voicemail greeting to an individual contact? For example, if someone from work that was in my contact book called, could the iPhone see the number, and play a voicemail greeting recorded specifically for that person?

I have searched these forums, and all through the app store, but there doesnt seem to be an "app for that". Any ideas?

[NDWalledGarden]

Really? Nobody?

[DrBlur]

Yep, nobody 8-)

[Jesse Hollington]

The short answer is no. Although your voicemail greetings can be recorded on the iPhone, they're actually stored on your cellular carrier's servers, which means that this is a feature your carrier would need to provide, as they're the ones providing the voicemail. When a call comes in and goes to voicemail, it's not being answered by your phone, but rather by your cellular provider's voicemail servers, so your iPhone really has nothing to do with the voicemail greeting or even the storage of messages (beyond downloading copies of them for the visual voicemail feature).

There are third-party voicemail providers like Google Voice that can do this for you, but you'd have to drop Visual Voicemail and use the other service as your voicemail provider instead.

[rockmyplimsoul]

Originally Posted by jhollington

There are third-party voicemail providers like Google Voice that can do this for you, but you'd have to drop Visual Voicemail and use the other service as your voicemail provider instead.

Google Voice is great in that regard. You get a separate Google phone number that will ring your phone, and you can give that to business contacts and assign a different greeting than your personal phone number's greeting. But AFIK, it is only two greetings, one for your Google number and one for your given number from your carrier.

[Jesse Hollington]

Actually, you can set up a customized greeting in Google Voice by contact group or even by individual contact. For groups it's configured under "Groups" in the Google Voice settings, and just pulls in the contact groups that you've already setup in your Google Contacts. For individual contacts, you have to access them from the contacts list in Google Voice and then click the "Edit Google Voice Settings" link.

I don't know what the upper limit is for the number of greetings, or if there even is one.

[icFace]

Originally Posted by NDWalledGarden

...
Is there any way to customize a voicemail greeting to an individual contact? For example, if someone from work that was in my contact book called, could the iPhone see the number, and play a voicemail greeting recorded specifically for that person?
...

Both ON Voicefeed and Hullomail will do that. (Both are country-specific. I hope at least one of them works where you are.)