The switchboard
Thirty years of office phone features, now free and open for your home.
The people you list ring the house. Everyone else meets the doorman, dials an extension, or hears "Good day."
Anyone who stopped answering the landline because every call was for somebody else, or for nobody at all.
Ring the right phone first, and the whole house only if nobody picks up.
Households where a call for one person wakes everybody.
911 leaves by the trunk whose street address is filed, tried first and never second-guessed.
Every household, before the first handset is handed to a child.
Let the afternoon conversation happen. Give ordinary calls a stopping time.
Families who want a child's home handset to follow the household bedtime.
Route an extension to voicemail or an adult during its quiet hours.
Anyone whose phone is in a room where someone sleeps.
Reuse an address book, while keeping caller screening and phone directories separate.
Households tired of typing the same family numbers into several places.
Dial 500 and every handset opens at once. Dinner is ready without shouting up the stairs.
Anyone who currently communicates between floors by yelling.
Dial 101 for the kitchen. The call never leaves the house and never touches the carrier.
Houses where a conversation currently involves stairs.
Park a call in the kitchen, pick it up in the office. The house behaves like a small hotel.
Anyone who has ever carried a phone to another room to fetch someone.
Per-mailbox, with the message delivered to email — and lamps that follow whichever box you point a phone at.
Households where "did you get my message?" is a recurring conversation.
Dial *80, say a time, leave a message. At 7:30 the phone rings and plays it back to you.
Anyone who has said "remind me at seven" to a room with nobody in it.
Because a silent hold is indistinguishable from a dropped call.
Anyone who has said "hello? hello?" into a phone that was working fine.
The lamp on your handset tells you the office is already on a call, before you pick up.
Households with more than one person who takes calls.
Dial 600 and everyone who joins is in the same room, including an outside caller.
Families spread across houses, and anyone tired of group video calls.
Dial 555 and ask the house a question — with no microphone listening the rest of the time.
People who want a voice assistant and do not want an always-on microphone.
Text "garage" to the house number and Home Assistant opens it, for the people you list, and says so back.
People who already run Home Assistant and would rather text the house than open an app.
The doorman's lines are a folder of audio. Swap the folder and a Victorian doorman, a bureaucrat or a ship's computer answers instead.
Anyone who wants the stranger's greeting to sound like their house.
Not one of these is big enough to sell on its own, which is exactly why households never got them. They existed for offices, behind a five-figure switch and a maintenance contract. Once you own the switchboard, a feature stops being a purchase order and becomes a few lines of configuration — which is the entire argument for this being free software rather than a product.