The switchboard
Thirty years of office phone features, now free and open for your home.
Ring the right phone first, and the whole house only if nobody picks up.
Households where a call for one person wakes everybody.
A line that stops ringing at bedtime, and can send the call somewhere awake instead.
Anyone whose phone is in a room where someone sleeps.
Dial 500 and every handset opens at once. Dinner is ready without shouting up the stairs.
Anyone who currently communicates between floors by yelling.
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.
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.
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.