A computerized telephone answering system that digitizes incoming voice messages and stores them on disk or flash memory. Voicemail often provides auto attendant capability, which uses prerecorded messages to route the caller to the appropriate person, department or mailbox. Voicemail systems may also offer directory lookup by name.
The term is so ubiquitous that it may also refer to older answering machines that are analog tape recorders with answering features. See
virtual voicemail and
visual voicemail.