Steve Smith, one of the pioneers of telemarketing software, and John Price, who runs telemarketing company Price Direct and chairs the DMA's Contact Centre council, have been developing their TrueCall product for four years and claim it is a world-first.
The pair authored the 2005 Brookmead Report, which raised industry awareness about the impact of nuisance calls such as silent calls made by predictive dialling machines.
The telemarketing industry has been supportive of the product, according to Price. "By stopping complaints, by hearing consumers we are not restricting the indsutry, in fact we're helping to sustain it," he said. "We're heading off an opt-in [regime] and we're demonstrating that the industry can police itself."
The product is on sale via from £99.99, is the size of a small paperback book and connects to a landline socket.
It allows calls from numbers approved by the user to be connected straight away. Users can either pre-approve numbers or approve any incoming calls by pressing the '*' button.
However, callers it does not recognise have identify themselves before TrueCall rings the householder's phone to and plays the caller's message, allowing the householder to answer or not.
This means that the householder's phone will not ring when a predictive dialler generates a call, until a call centre worker comes on the line to talk to the TrueCall.
Callers householders do not like can be put onto a "Zap" list, which means future calls from the same number will be answered by TrueCall's own automated message politely telling them the recipient is not interested and the phone will not ring at all.
What could give TrueCall a greater impact is an as yet unactivated feature that makes it possible for it to download a list of blacklisted numbers via the internet from a central server.
Price said: "We're not going to set up a central database just yet but it might be something we would do in the future, to [let users] say 'I don't mind hearing from charities but I don't want to hear from double glazing companies'. This is something that we will give options to consumers [to do] once we pick up, once we sense their need."
He stressed that he himself did not want to be in the position of distinguishing between "good" and "bad" businesses but would instead source third-party lists users could download.