Our test involved a simple USR Sportster Vi voice modem. Both packages correctly identified it and configured themselves automatically. Both have very professional sounding pre-recorded greetings, though in thick American accents. You can record your own greetings using your PC's sound card and microphone or by speaking into the attached telephone handset - it's best to use the former. You can also record .WAV files in external sound editors and then import them.

Matching sampling rates can be hit and miss in order to find the best quality. TalkWorks has a more complicated greeting message system and a more comprehensive recording and editing system. However, don't expect to achieve the audio clarity in greetings managed by high-end professional computer telephony systems. That said, both systems recorded incoming messages from callers with good sonic quality.

One black mark for TalkWorks was its inability to run the message alert feature properly. This is supposed to dial a pre-programmed number after a fax or voice message has been received and play a recording to tell you what's happened. For us, the number would dial but before we could answer the call, the message played and the modem had hung up. Luckily, this was the only serious problem we encountered.