I thought this was awesome! Have a good time and enjoy!
---- Original Message ------
From: "Sherri" <[email protected]
Subject: [Electronics-talk] One number to ring them all
Date sent: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 08:24:28 -0400
This sounds great!
Tech Update of the N Y Times, Washington Post, and MIT's Tech
Review
State of the Art
One Number to Ring Them All
By DAVID POGUE
If Google search revolutionized the Web, and Gmail
revolutionized
free e-mail, then one thing's for sure: Google Voice,
unveiled
Thursday, will revolutionize telephones.
It unifies your phone numbers, transcribes your voice mail,
blocks
telemarketers and elevates [10]text messages to first-class
communication citizens. And that's just the warm-up.
Google Voice began life in 2005 as something called
GrandCentral. It
was, in its own way, revolutionary.
It was intended to solve the headaches of having more than
one phone
number (home, work, cellphone and so on): Having to check
multiple
answering machines. Missing calls when people try to reach
you on your
cell when you're at home (or the other way around).
Sending around
e-mail at work that says, "On Thursday from 5 to 8:30, I'll
be on my
cell; for the rest of the weekend, call me at home." And
having to
change phone numbers when you switched jobs or cities.
GrandCentral's solution was to offer you a new, single,
unified phone
number, in an area code of your choice. Whenever somebody
dialed your
uni-number, all of your phones rang at once.
No longer did people have to track you down by dialing
multiple
numbers; no matter where you were, your uni-number found
you. And all
voice mail messages landed in a single voice mail box, on
the Web. (You
could also dial in to hear them as usual.)
On the Web, you could play back your messages or even
download them as
audio files to preserve for posterity. You could even ask
to be
notified of new voice mail by e-mail.
But wait, there was more. Each time you answered a call,
while the
caller was still hearing "one ringy-dingy, two
ringy-dingies," you
heard a recording offering four ways to handle the call:
"Press 1 to
accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice
mail, or 4 to
accept and record the call." If you pressed 3, the call
went directly
to voice mail, but you could listen in. If you felt that
the caller
deserved your immediate attention, you could press * to
pick up and
join the call. This subtle feature saved time, conserved
cellular
minutes and, in certain cases, avoided a great deal of
interpersonal
conflict.
GrandCentral also let you record a different voice mail
greeting for
each person in your address book: "Hey, dollface, leave me
a sweet
nothing" for your love interest, "Hi, boss, I'm out making
us both some
money" for your employer.
You could also specify which phones would ring when certain
people
called. (For the really annoying people in your life, you
could even
tell GrandCentral to answer with the classic, three-tone
"The number
you have dialed is no longer in service" message.)
Also very cool: Any time during a call, you could press the
* key to
make all of your phones ring again, so that you could pick
up on a
different phone in midcall. If you were heading out the
door, you could
switch a landline call to your cellphone.
GrandCentral also offered telemarketing spam filters,
off-hour call
blocking ("never ring my BlackBerry on weekends"), and a
dizzying
number of other functions. For people with complicated
lives,
GrandCentral was a breath of fresh air. It felt like a
secret power
that nobody else had.
Then, in 2007, Google bought GrandCentral. It stopped
accepting new
members, ceased any visible work on it, and, apparently,
forgot about
it completely. The early adopters, several hundred
thousand of them,
were able to keep using GrandCentral's features. But as
time went on,
their hearts sank. In January, Salon.com summed it up in
an editorial
called, "Will the Last One to Leave GrandCentral Please
Turn Out the
Lights?"
As it turns out, the joke was on them. Google was quietly
working on
GrandCentral all along. Starting Thursday, existing
GrandCentral
members can upgrade to Google Voice. In a few weeks, after
debugging
the system, Google will open the service to all.
Google Voice starts with a clean, redesigned Web site that
looks like
an in box, a la Gmail. It maintains all of those original
GrandCentral
features - but more important, introduces four
game-changing new ones.
FREE VOICE MAIL TRANSCRIPTIONS From now on, you don't have
to listen to
your messages in order; you don't have to listen to them at
all. In
seconds, these recordings are converted into typed text.
They show up
as e-mail messages or text messages on your cellphone.
This is huge. It means that you can search, sort, save,
forward, copy
and paste voice mail messages.
No human effort is involved; it's all done with software.
As a result,
the transcriptions are rarely perfect. For one thing,
Google's software
doesn't seem to have discovered punctuation yet. ("ohh hi
it's michelle
i just wanted to let you know that i really had fun last
night and it's
really great to see you okay talk to you later bye bye.")
There are errors, of course; it's hard enough for people to
understand
cellphone conversations, let alone computers. Cleverly
enough, the Web
site displays transcribed words more faintly (light gray)
when it is
less confident about the transcription. Fortunately, it
generally nails
numbers -- phone numbers, arrival times, addresses. And
the rest is
accurate enough to convey the gist.
Companies like PhoneTag, Callwave and Spinvox already
transcribe voice
mail, complete with punctuation. They're great, but they
cost money.
Google Voice is free.
FREE CONFERENCE CALLING Never again will you pay for a
conference call,
or require a special dial-in number, or mess around with
access codes.
All you do is tell your friends to call your GrandCentral
at the
specified time -- and boom, you can conference them in as
they call
you. No charge.
DIRT-CHEAP INTERNATIONAL CALLS If you dial your own Google
Voice number
from one of your phones, you're offered an option to call
overseas at
rates even lower than Skype's (and much lower than your
cellphone
company's): 2 cents a minute to France or China, 3 cents to
Chile or
the Czech Republic. Sweet.
TEXT MESSAGE ORGANIZATION Google Voice's last feature is
its most
profound. The old GrandCentral wasn't great with text
messages sent to
your uni-number. In fact, it ignored them. They just
disappeared.
Google Voice, however, does the right thing: it sends text
messages to
whichever cellphones you want -- even multiple phones
simultaneously.
Even more important, it collects them in your Web in-box
just like
e-mail. You can file them, search them and, for the first
time in
cellphone history, keep them. They don't vanish forever
once your
cellphone gets full.
You can also reply to them with a click, either with a call
or another
text; your back-and-forths appear online as a conversation.
Google Voice eliminates some of the annoyances of its
predecessor. You
can, if you wish, turn off that "press 1, press 2" option,
so when the
phone rings, you can just pick it up and start talking.
Google has also
done some Googlish integration; for example, your Gmail and
Google
Voice address books are the same.
Nitpicks? Sure. The service has vastly beefed up its
selection of
available uni-numbers, but there are still some area codes
you can't
get (212 is especially rare). As a side effect of Google
Voice's
ring-all-phones-at-once technology, you sometimes find
fragments of
Google Voice error recordings on the answering machines of
the phones
you didn't answer. (Solution: make your voice mail
greeting at least 15
seconds long.) There's a learning curve to all of this,
too.
Still, you can't imagine how much the game changes when you
have a
single phone number, voice mail transcriptions and
nondeleting text
messages on every phone. Suddenly, your communications are
not only
unified, but they're unified everywhere at once -- the
cellphone, the
Web and the e-mail program. And all of it free -- even
ad-free.
There mthe cay be some fallout as a result; I'd hate to be
a company
that
sells voice mail transcription or conferencing calling
services right
about now. But that's life, right? Every now and then, a
little
revolution is good for us.
E-mail: [email protected]
_______________________________________________
Electronics-talk mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/electronics-talk_nfbnet.or
g
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info
for Electronics-talk:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/electronics-talk_nfbnet.org
/chickerland%40gmail.com
___
Replies to this message will go directly to the sender.
If your reply would be useful to the list, please send a
copy to the list as well.
To leave the BrailleNote list, send a blank message to
[email protected]
To view the list archives or change your preferences, visit
http://list.humanware.com/mailman/listinfo/braillenote
