[Electronics-talk] One number to ring them all

[Zach D]

Cool! Very neat! Do u have google talk yet?

> ----- Original Message -----
>From: "Sherri" <flmom2006 at gmail.com
>To: "Discussion of accessible electronics and 
appliances"<electronics-talk at nfbnet.org
>Date sent: Sun, 15 Mar 2009 08:24:28 -0400
>Subject: [Electronics-talk] One number to ring them all

>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: pogue at nytimes.com

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