Intelligent peripheral

This invention relates to an intelligent peripheral (IP) for connecting to a telephone network and providing added capabilities to the network. More particularly the invention relates to programmable suppression of call answer supervision by an intelligent peripheral or a voice recognition unit in a telephone network. The method comprises the steps of: the peripheral device receiving a call setup message from a network switch when a call is being initiated. The IP, on receipt of the call setup signal, suppresses the normal answer signal output and instead outputs a progress signal to the network switch. For an ISDN network the progress signal is a Progress Indicator PI=08 signal.