Grand Central - All The Phone Services You Wanted
(Posted by freakface at 10/03/2007 02:43:00 PM) Grand Central sent me an invite to try out their service. Grand Central is an abstraction of phone service. By that what I mean is that it sits on top of your phone service - cell, pots, skype, whatever you have, and adds features by being in front of your phone service.
Grand Central is now a Google company, so you know that they're going to be well-funded.
Here's how it works: GC issues you a new phone number, in an area code that you choose. When someone calls that number, GC adds features to your phone service, and forwards the call to up to three numbers until one of them picks up or the call is routed to GC's voicemail.
SO WHAT?
I know. That doesn't sound exciting. It didn't to me, either, but that was before I checked it out. What I'm going to describe to you are features that are optional (as in you can turn them on or off, but they're all free). First, if GC doesn't recognize a caller id as being someone you normally speak to, it first asks them who they are. It then calls you to check if you want to talk to this person, showing you their caller id info. You then have an option: a) Take the call, b) Send the call to voicemail, c) listen to the the other person as they leave the voicemail before deciding what to do (old-style answering machine mode), or d) Record the call.
Features, Features, Features
Record The Call? You now can record that fraudulent telemarketer giving the pitch. For those of you with creditors harassing you, you can record them, too. Yes, you can start recording any call at any time (and you can stop recording, at any time, too).
Old-style Answering Machine? While the voicemail is being recorded you can then either pick up, mark the voicemail to be deleted and hang up (you don't have to continue listening to the voicemail until it's done before deciding to delete it), or decide to save the voicemail and hang up. This whole feature is great for saving cell minutes. If I don't recognize a number I just send it to voicemail while I listen to it. If I then realize it's someone I need to talk to I just pick it up. Otherwise I can either choose to finish listening to the message later or just tell GC to nuke it now so I don't have to waste cell minutes later doing the same thing. Very cool.
Voicemail 2.0 One of the things I love about my VOIP service is that the voicemail is accessible via the phone, but it's also emailed to me and available on the VOIP provider's web site. I think that's so cool. GC does the same thing. So again, I don't have to burn cell minutes if I don't want to for the purpose of dealing with voicemail, because the voicemail is sent to my email as a .wav file, and it is also available at GC's website. UNLIKE my VOIP provider, the email from GC includes a link to click on to go right to the message in GC to delete, save, etc. Oh, and you can have voicemail info sent via SMS to your mobile, if you choose.
Also cool - if you're listening to a voicemail, you can hit a button on your phone (or click a button in your browser, if you're checking it that way) and GC will call the person back without you having to scroll through numbers to find theirs, or write the number down and then try to dial it. If you're listening on the web, GC will first call your phones to get you on the line, then connect the call to the other person. After you're done with the callback, you can just continue to listen to voicemail.
You can also have different people get different voicemail greetings, too. So the wife gets the nice, masculine tone, and the hoops squad gets the f-bombs.
Visual Voicemail For The Rest Of Us So, you dont' have an iPhone, either? With GC you get visual voicemail. Really. It might not look as cool as the iPhone, but it is the same functionality.
Call Handling I REALLY don't want to talk to Joe. No problem. Joe goes right to voicemail. I really don't want my mistress, err, golf buddies getting the house or my cell. No problem. Joe -> voicemail. "Golf Buddies" -> SkypeIn. The wife's got the preggies, and I'm going to be in conference room "B", where we get crappy cell reception. No problem. Call handling in GC is really cool.
Call Blocking My old VOIP provider let me block any number. My new one doesn't. GC does. GC further lets me mark certain numbers as SPAM, which allows me to either send them to a second mailbox within my account (say you have a lawn service that bugs you several times a year to buy some supplemental service, but also calls you when renewal comes around - you can send them to the SPAM mailbox, which you can then deal with whenever you feel like it, toss the junk messages and listen to the one you need). ON TOP OF THAT you can send Spam to a "number not in service" message, which I believe also contains the "magic tones" that telemarketers computer systems use to automatically remove a number from their active database.
Community Blocking GC develops rules based on the feedback of its users. If a bunch of people are getting credit card offers from the same number and mark them as spam, that number is developed into an optional GC rule, which will mean that if you choose to turn on the feature, other GC users will be helping to protect you from telemarketers.
CallSwitch That name is really deceiving. It really should be called "phone switch", because it lets you re-ring your phones in the middle of a call. So - someone calls. It rings the house. The problem is that I'm getting ready to get out the door. I could call them back on the cell, or I could hit a button on my phone, and the call will ring my phones again so I can pick up the cell. Again on the cell-minute-saver, if I'm outside mowing the lawn, and get a call on the cell, I can take it, walk into the house, hit a button, switch the call to the house phone, and save the minutes.
WebCall Skype has this cool feature called "SkypeMe" which you can put on your ebay listsings, your website, an email you send to someone, or wherever. They click on it, and skype rings. This is the same thing, except they're calling your...whatever you have tied to GC. I think this is a neat addition. I can now embed these into emails that I send people and if they want to call instead of replying to the email, they can. I'm going to work on configuring this in just a moment because I think this is a very neat feature. Because of the control that GC gives me, I can send these calls only to my work phone (or in my case my work phones). No, they don't need a headset. GC will call them and then you.
Ringshare When people call you, they no longer get the same sound they get when the call everyone else - unless that's what you want. You can now give them a variety of tones or other sounds. Buddies get the sound of armpit farts when your phone is ringing. The wife gets you telling her how pretty she is. Yes, it's a novelty, but it's cool. Yes, you can upload your own sounds/files, etc. for people to listen to. For now I picked one of the voices they have on the site that says "Welcome to ringback roulette. Place your bets. Voicemail, or will he pick up?
Phone Service, Abstracted
That's what I mean by phone service abstracted. GrandCentral has added a whole new set of features on top of your existing phone service without you doing anything...well, almost anything.
How Do I Join?
As of right now, you have to get invited by someone who is already a member. This is the way gmail worked for quite a while - you got someone who was a gmail member to invite you to join. Yes, it's free.
