[gui-talk] One number to ring them all
albert griffith
albertgriffith at sbcglobal.net
Sun Mar 15 20:31:31 UTC 2009
You're not the only one who finds Gmail difficult to use.
While they have a full complement of short cuts jaws won't work in the mode
Google requires to display them. I reread the article and most features can
be accessed via phone, however, you would have to access the in box and
address book from the web. Now that the web navigation keys for jaws are
more robust it won't be difficult because you won't be covering the vast
amount of real-estate needed to handle quantities of messages. With those
limitations in mind you would be able to hear mail messages, access the
answering machine, accept phone calls and call conference style. You could
also integrate calls from your home and cell phones plus make real cheap
long distance calls. At a minimum this will allow users to scale their land
line services back to their minimums saving many quite a bit of cash. I
particularly like two features: never having to hear from another
telemarketer and the ability to assign a different greeting to each of my
contacts. P.S. I think I'll enjoy the ability to record conversations I'm
having. This will make driving directions and appointment information
easier to capture. Now that AOL has used this accessibility tool kit to
develop keyboard shortcuts for their e-mail program Google will do the same.
They might use the same short cuts. I hope others reading the article will
have more input.
-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Joel Deutsch
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 1:58 PM
To: NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] One number to ring them all
Albert,
I was wondering the same thing as the lister to whom you're responding. In
my case, my question would be, does anyone have an idea whether the controls
for all this would be easy to use with Jaws? By the way, I'm speaking as
someone who doesn't bother using my one gmail account because even though I
took a lot of time to learn the interface, and I know other screen reader
users do all right with it, I just could not get comfortable or skillful
with it, myself. So I figure that if you're good with Jaws or another screen
reader when using Google Mail or Gmail, this stuff will be manageable, too.
if I understand David Pogue's description of the service interface
correctly.
But what do you mean by answering that it ought to be accessible because
it's all tied to your phone? Do you mean the whole function works through
the keypad of either your land line or your cell phone, or both? Did I miss
that? The star key and so forth? Because so much of Pogue's explanation was
about how you could manage your voice mail and text messages online. In
fact, I was left with the understanding that if you signed up for this, you
could never again just use your land line's answering machine or your cell
phone's voice mail in the normal way. I think I am a little confused.
Please explain more if you have the time and patience.
Thanks,
Joel
----- Original Message -----
From: "albert griffith" <albertgriffith at sbcglobal.net>
To: "'NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List'" <gui-talk at nfbnet.org>
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 9:57 AM
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] One number to ring them all
Since it's controlled by your phone I don't expect problems.
-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Bill Spiry
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 11:27 AM
To: 'NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List'
Subject: Re: [gui-talk] One number to ring them all
How's the accessibility going to be with this service? Anyone have a sense
of that yets?
-----Original Message-----
From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
Behalf Of Sherri
Sent: Sunday, March 15, 2009 5:26 AM
To: NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List
Subject: [gui-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
_______________________________________________
gui-talk mailing list
gui-talk at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/gui-talk_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
gui-talk:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/gui-talk_nfbnet.org/bspiry%40comcast.n
et
_______________________________________________
gui-talk mailing list
gui-talk at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/gui-talk_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
gui-talk:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/gui-talk_nfbnet.org/albertgriffith%40s
bcglobal.net
_______________________________________________
gui-talk mailing list
gui-talk at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/gui-talk_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
gui-talk:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/gui-talk_nfbnet.org/jdeutsch%40dslextr
eme.com
_______________________________________________
gui-talk mailing list
gui-talk at nfbnet.org
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/listinfo/gui-talk_nfbnet.org
To unsubscribe, change your list options or get your account info for
gui-talk:
http://www.nfbnet.org/mailman/options/gui-talk_nfbnet.org/albertgriffith%40s
bcglobal.net
More information about the GUI-Talk
mailing list