March 12, 2009
>  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 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 he
>  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, Salonddcom 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, à 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 may 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: [log in to unmask]
>  Copyright 2009
>  The New York Times Company


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