John Sequeira

Amped::Technology

Friday, March 02, 2007
Making Phone work like Email. For Free

I've been waiting for a couple of services that help make my phone work more like my email. Thanks to Lifehacker, I found out that two of these are now available for free.

The first is GotVoice, the phone equivalent of fetchmail. The service dials into your cell phone voice mail account, navigates the phone tree, plays and rerecords your messages, and then sends you an email notice of this fact. I sometimes leave my phone turned off at work, and don't always get the voice mail notification in a timely fashion (ditto when traveling and/or in areas with poor reception). At the same time, no matter where I am, I do manage to check email. So GotVoice let's my compulsive-email-checking make up for my non-compulsive voice mail checking. Nicely done.

If you pay GotVoice they'll email you the voice mail, but otherwise you go to their site and it plays in a flash widget. I'll take the ads to get the unified inbox - thanks GotVoice.

The second is GrandCentral -- which is the phone equivalent of pobox.com. They provide you with a number which you then simply connect to multiple other numbers (home/office/cell) that you want to ring when someone calls your GrandCentral number. They too implement voice mail, and will email you a notice about it. You can define times when not to ring your home number, and customize by times (don't call home during the day) and person (send ceiling insulation salesperson to /dev/null ). Lots to play with.

What's the biggest appeal for me? Almost all of my billing-related-calls to my phone or cell provider leave me gnashing my teeth, and wishing my switching costs were much closer to zero than they are. Grand Central lowers the switching cost by being the one number I can hand out to people, decoupled from where the phone actually rings. In addition, I get further inbox unification and find-me-follow-me -- thanks Grand Central.

GotVoice Aside: GV is a very high-touch application at the moment, sending you an ad-laden email a few times a day that no voice mail was found, so writing a quick mail filter to strip the out negative results is time well spent.

GotVoice Aside #2: Stephen O'Grady recommends CallVantage -- ad-free GotVoice-like functionality, so you can skip the mail filter. They do not support SprintPCS at the moment, so they are dead to me. Google for CallVantage etc. on Lifehacker for a decent competitor comparison, if you're in the market for voicemail++.
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