Google's Grand Central: First Impressions

I got my new Google Grand Central account invite today, so I quickly went to setup the account. Setup is simple, first you pick the phone number you want, then you enter your current phone number, they call you and you type in the code they give you. Then you proceede to your personal info and you are done.

I haven't had time to give this service an indepth review, but I did get some strong first impressions.

The goal of this service is "One number for life". GrandCentral gives you a phone number, and you use this as your public phone number. Give it to everybody, friends, family, co-workers.

Then in Grand Central you can add up to 6 of your current phone numbers. These numbers can be home phones, cell phones, work, or anywhere else you commonly hang out at. Grand central will tie all of these numbers into your single grand central numbers. If your home number changes, no problem, edit the number in your grand central account and all calls are automatically routed to your new phone number, nobody needs to be informed.

But, you want customization, right? If your buddies are calling you, you may not want them to reach you at work, but only on your cell or home phone. You don't want people from work to call you and have the office ring, or your spouse to call you from home and have it ring the home phone. You setup various groups, and you tell each group which phone you want them to get ahold of.

This is what groups are for. You assign your contacts to a group, family, work, friends, and others. You cannot, however create your own groups, and I see that as a huge limiting factor. You can adjust the settings on an individual contact basis, but if you have several peopole that you want to have the same setings for, it would be much easier to put them all in a custom group.

Quick Rule

There is a quick rule setting that will override all of your current settings. You can have everything route to voicemail if you don't want to be disturbed, or temporarily route everything to a new number. Then you just turn off the quick rule and everythign goes back to normal.

Custom Greetings

You can setup a custom greeting for each group, so if someone from that group calls and goes to your voicemail they only hear the message that is for that group alone. You can create a custom greeting on a per user basis, just like YouMail (see my previous coverage). One more advantage that YouMail has over Grand Central is that they have a huge selection of pre-recorded messages. These messages don't have the personal touch of recording it yourself, but they are fun for friends and family. With Grand Central you can only record your own messages.

Ring Back Tones

Grand Central offers free ring back tones, called Ringshare, so people calling don't have to listen to a boring normal ring. When Google bought Grand Central they limited this service by taking away the mp3 uploading, to protect themselves from copywrite no doubt, and you have to choose from their library of approved licensed ring back tones. This collection, well, it sucks. You can choose from the rings of 6 different countries, 4 sound effects, and 4 voice recordings. Very limited, no music or anything. If there were more rings, and a huge selection of music then this would be awesome. But at least you do get the chance to assign each group, or individual, it's own ringshare.

Spam Blocker

The entire Grand Central community flags spam messages, and telemarketers and they get added to a spam filter. If someone from this spam filter calls you, their call is not put through to your phone. You can select if you want this service on or off and also you select if the message left by the person is deleted or put into a spam folder. For those of you who hate telemarketers, this is a good way to do it. It's just too bad they can't protect your actual home number, they can only protect the Grand Central account. So, if you constantly get plauged by telemarketers, you may want to consider this free service.

Visual Voice Mails

There is a nice web interface that shows you all the calsl that you ahve and who it is from. This way you can skip straight to the messages you want to hear. You can also save these messages forever and forward them to others.

Block Callers

You can set certain individuals to be blocked, then the person will hear a standard "number out of service" message. It isn't customizable for what message to play, but it works all the same.

Web Call Button

Now this is a neat feature for a business website. You create a button and the person clicks on it, enters their phone number, then Grand Central calls their number and your number. So it puts your customers in contact with you without giving out your number. When you activate this service, it adds itself as another group and you have all the same options. You can change the ring they hear, have a custom voicemail, and select which, if any, phones it rings. If you don't want it to ring your phone you can have it go straigt to voicemail.

Give it a try! Just click this button. Your number is protected as well.



Overview

I can't see this service being useful for an entire family, at least not until you can have custom groups, and I do see some limitations for things outside of business. If you have one phone number that you give out, that rings your home and cell, what if the person at home keeps answering before you can get to it on your cell? You would have to be careful how you setup which group can call each phone.

Overall, I think it would be really helpful if you could create custom groups, but the fact that you can unify all of your phones, and voicemails under a single number can be really beneficial.

YouMail vs Grand Central

It is hard to compare these since they have differnt goals to them.

YouMail is a lot more customizable for voicemails. The visual voicemail works the same, sending you voice messages to your email and allowing you to forward the messages to others and save them for life. With thousands of pre-recorded messages it makes the service more fun. They are trying to allow you to have the same voicemail settings on any phone under your account, including your land line phone, but you still have seperate numbers to deal with.

Grand Central works great for merging all of your numbers and voice mails into a single place, and if you ever change a phone number you just change it in your grand central control panel and you will never have to worry about letting everybody know. I can see this being very usefull for any single guy or business man who is out a lot, but for a family number I don't think it would work as well. Each member in your family would have to have their own account, then maybe it would work better, although if two accounts use the same home number I don't know if Grand Central would complain or not. Grand Central does have a much smoother, nicer looking website, but YouMail's website isn't bad either. Both take a simplistic view on things, which is the way it should be for services such as this. A simplistic website allows for easier customization and navigation.

So as far as which service you should use, I can't tell you that. Decide for yourself. Just keep in mind that Grand Central is in beta testing mode and you can only be invited by a current member. Both services are free so there is no harm in trying them, but there is no way to combine the services to use both.

I'll write a more in-depth review later if I find things that are different than I mentioned here.

P.S. Another benefit of this service, you can click a call button in your address book, enter your phone number and then it calls you, then that person is called. A great way to get ahold of people if you can't make a long distance call.

Until next time, this is Jon signing out and wishing you happy voicemailing!

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YouMail: Replace Your Mobile VoiceMail Service

As I spend time searching the net, viewing other's blogs and visiting tech, or geek websites, I occasionally come across very usefull services. Technology was designed to make life simpler and more organized, however, it seems that it can often do the opposite. So when I find a piece of tech out there that adds functionality, simplicity, or fun to your life, then I love to share it with others.

Like this website, YouMail.com. This is a free website voicemail service for your cell phone. Since it has the word "FREE" attached, I decided to give it a try.

Getting Started

Getting started was easy. I just entered my phone number for my cell phone, and they sent a text message to my phone with the password. I was then asked the model number of my phone, and then was directed to type in a number on my phone, call and hang it up. Then I just had to go to a setting in my messages area and change the voicemail number to the new phone number. Don't get too discouraged by all of this. By picking your cell phone and service, they give you step by step directions for your specific phone, so there isn't any guess work involved.

Then, you just simply go online to their website and I can either record a greeting directly onto the website, upload a file from my computer, or select a message from their selection where they boast 1000 + messages.

Mulitple Greetings

For my default voicemail I just use my own voice to give a simple message. Then I setup groups that will have some of the other fun messages, or even just for an individual. The selection is pretty neat, and you can upload your own .WAV files to add to their library also. I don't think that all of them are appropriate for a voicemail message, but they can be fun anyway, great for friends and family members to laugh at.

Cool Greetings

The sound library, called "Cool Greetings" allows users to rate the files. Although it appears that as of now you only get to rate a file once. If you change your mind or hit the wrong button, there is no way for you to re-rate it. Also you can add things to your favorites, but, as of now, you cannot remove them from your favorites. With each sound file is a link to use this file. You press that and you are taken to your YouMail control panel and the file is added to your list of current voicemessages. You can delete files from here if you don't want them anymore. The website does seem a little slow sometimes, especially in the Cool Greetings area, but it's nothing to shake a dial-up modem at.

Contacts

Once you have the files added you can assign them to a group or to individuals. One of the two biggest things I don't like about this service, is that you cannot upload your contacts from elsewhere. You have to enter them individually. This service does seem to be updated frequently, so I wouldn't be surprised to see something implimented before too long. Even something like Plaxo's Address Book Widget would be nice, but that is limited in that it only gives email addresses I believe.

So you add your contacts, then if you wish you can assign someone to a group, so they receive the same voicemail as the group gets. If you have a message, or greeting, assigned to a user and to the users group, you can set the group setting to either overwrite the individual greeting, or to play both greetings.

I have 3 groups setup. Friends, Family, and Work. I have a couple people in each one with a specific greeting. Then I have a couple family members who are not in the family group because I wanted them to have a special greeting without annoying them with 2 messages. Especially since one kind of long and they have no relation. The 2 message thing I could see being useful for businesses. If you have multiple clients, you can have a message for everybody, then at the end play a specific message for just that person.

Another downside that I hope gets fixed soon, if you add a phone number to a user, then remove that phone number and add it somewhere else, even to a different position on the same user, it will not let you. It says that you can't reuse a number. So you have to delete the origional contact that had that number then re-enter the updated info. If anybody from youmail reads this, PLEASE fix that.

My Tests

I have tested my voice mail from several phones, and they all work perfectly. After the normal number of rings I'm directed straight to the voicemail message that is assigned to that phone. There is no delay so nobody would even notice. Now, you can sound professional to those you work with and to your boss, sound all loving to your family, but be goofy to your friends all at the same time.

Some other really neat features of this service is that you can have mulitple phones under the same account, so the settings are all the same no matter which phone is called. They can even support Land Lines, although I couldn't get this setup since they don't support Vonage yet. That's the other big thing I didn't like about this service that I mentioned earlier. So I can't tell you how well the land line version works, if anybody tests it out please leave a comment with some details.

Since this service is web based, you can access all of your voice mails and missed calls online. You can save these message forever, or even forward them to other friends when a goofy or cute message is left. The messages can also be retrieved through your phone or even be sent directly to your email inbox.

Ditching

A unique feature that I have not heard of before, is called "call ditching". You select the ditch icon for an individual and then it plays the specific message for them and hangs up without allowing them to leave a message. There are even several pre-recorded messages just for this service. You can get a disconnected message, or some funnier or annoying ones. This would be useful for an ex-boy/girl friend that just doesn't get the message, or for pesky telemarketers that you don't want calling you anymore. I haven't tested this service out yet and don't plan on using it on anybody so I don't know for sure how well it works, but I don't see how there would be any problems. Maybe tonight I'll try to ditch myself and see if it works from my other phone...

I have been reviewing this service for about 2 days now, and so far I have had no problems, although I have not had anybody call to leave a message for me, so I have to leave the messages myself. It's pretty bad when the only person you can get to leave messages for you is yourself. Oh well. For some fun I should put my dad's voicemail message to be "The person you are calling right now cannot come to the phone, please leave a message after the beep... and don't forget to vote for Hillary Clinton." That would probably spark some interesting messages that my dad would leave on my phone. =:)

Just for the record DO NOT vote for Hillary Clinton. I in no way endorse her or her views and would NOT want to see her become a leader of our nation. That was meant strictly as a joke! You may now continue...

Use it!

From what I have seen so far I would recommend others to use this, however, you may want to hold off for a bit. While researching this service from others sites I discovered another, similar, yet more powerful site. This site has been bought by Google, so they promise to keep it free. It has a different purpose and direction, but all the functionality of YouMail is included, plus a whole lot more. The down side is that it's in beta testing and you have to be invited. Hopefully by mid-week next week I will have my invite and be able to test this one out as well. After I do that I will be sure to write a blog about it and give my opinion on the service.

If you do want to jump on this site, the address, once again is http://youmail.com/.

Now to go find a special message for my wife!

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New FREE 411 service from Google

I found out today that Google is testing out a new FREE service. They call it Goog 411, and what it does is act almost as a traditional 411 service to lookup a name and address for you and connect your call automatically. This is much better than the traditional 411 service in that it is completly free.

I briefly tested out the service today and here is what I thought of it.

- Voice activated: Most of the time I hate using voice activated phone calls, I want to talk to a person, not a computer who can barely understand me! So at first I had that as a negative point for this service, but I tried it anyway. Of all the voice activated services that I have used, this one is probably the best. It is simple, and easily understood my voice. I didn't have to repeat what I was saying for anything. I was understood the first time and I didn't have to confirm everything that I said, which is definatly great.

I called and it gave me a breif welcome, then asked for city and state (or you can use zip code), so I said "Colorado Springs Colorado" and the voice came back saying "Colorado Springs Colorado, say the business name or type". So that was cool, it didn't make me say "yes" to confirm that it heard me right, it just repeated what I said so I know it heard me right and moved right along. If it doesn't get it right all the time, you can say "go back" or "start over".

So after looking up a business name, Best Buy, it fed me the results. It gave the location (not the full address) of the closest match, a few instructional commands I could use, and then said it would connect me automatically. Some of the instructions included saying "details" to receive the details of that location, including the address and phone number, or you can say "next" to go to the next search result.

All in all it took about a minute or less to find the number that I was looking for and then connect me, without frustrating me at all. (Very cool!)

It would be better if I was talking to a person instead of a computer, but if the service is free then I think I could do without that. Besides, if a person did answer it would probably be someone from India with a thick accent that I can barely understand. So it isn't too bad this way.

To use this service, just dial 800-GOOG-411 and that's it.

Here is some information from the Goog411 website.

About Google Voice Local
Search

As part of our ongoing effort to make the world's
information universally accessible, we’re testing a free service called Google
Voice Local Search. Using this service, you get fast access to the same local
information you’d find on Google Maps. But you don’t need a computer, you don’t
need an Internet connection, and you don’t even need to use your cell-phone
keypad. It’s voice-activated, and you can access it from any phone (mobile or
landline), in any location, at any time.

Here are a few of the features:

• You can find a business listing by category. Just say "pizza," for example.


• You can send the listing details to your mobile phone via SMS.


• The service is fully automated, so it doesn’t rely on human operators.


• It connects you directly to the business, free of charge. However, your telephone company may apply regular charges for making a phone call or receiving an SMS.

Google Voice Local Search is still in its experimental
stage. It may not be available at all times and may not work for all users.
We’re fine-tuning the service to get better at recognizing our user’s requests
and at finding the businesses they are looking for. It’s currently only
available in English, in the US, for US business listings.

If I find any problems or other issues with this service I will make sure I let you know. So go, and no longer pay big fees for 411 services!

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