A system and method for providing voice communications with desired characteristics based upon the intended recipient of a voice communication. An apparatus includes a list of dial strings associated with parties having desired voice communication characteristics. A dial string entered by a user and associated with an intended recipient is compared to a list of preferred dial strings to determine the characteristics of an encoded voice signal to be sent to the recipient. The apparatus can include a vocoder having different bit rate modes and a bit rate mode is selected based upon the dial string entered by a user. Dial strings can be stored at the device or on a network. The apparatus can include a mode selector to select a desired vocoder mode to generate an encoded voice signal.