The following are services and tips that I have collected from diverse websites and are now part of my everyday tools that enhance my telecommunications experience:

Are you tired of paying your phone service provider for using 411? I was paying Verizon $1.49 every time I pressed 411 which I would only do if I was on my cell phone without access to Google. That is cheap compared to what other phone companies are charging. I now use 1-800-FREE411 (1-800-373-3411) which provides the same service free. It is mostly an automated service but I found the speech recognition and the text-to-speech to be very good. The few times that I've had a problem, I was quickly helped by a human operator. Sometimes the human operator answers the call before the automated service. I think I got better service than my phone company. The service seems to be going through some growing pains and sometimes they would not answer because "...all the circuits were busy." They also have a free call completion service but as both their recorded message and their website explain, that service is not yet available "...due to the heavy call volume."  Of course, the service is not really free, and you are supposed to listen to a 15 second ad before they provide you with your requested number. I have yet to be bothered by any ads but I suspect that is because the service does not have all their systems in place. Also as they explain on their website, they will only play ads that are related to your query which might actually be useful, if for example you are calling for a pizza restaurant listing. The service is available from either land lines or cell phones. If you use your cell phone you will, of course, be charged for airtime just like any other 800 number.

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Speaking of Google for searching addresses and phone numbers, if you include a City and State in your query you will get Google Local results with not just the address and phone information but also an embedded map which is, of course, a Google Map and that I have just discovered has now become Google Local; Google Maps is no longer in Beta! If you are interested in other Google Hacks, O'Reilly is a great place to start.

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I recently heard about 1-800-555-TELL (1-800-555-8355) which is a phone service that provides all types of information via recorded messages and text-to-speech. I played with the service for about an hour and got mixed results. To start with, the speech recognition is somewhat frustrating, it doesn't always work plus the way the menu prompts are presented do not seem to allow for quick interruption and successful recognition of subsequent commands. The speech recognition seems to improve if you do not use a speaker phone. The service quickly becomes annoying because of the smarminess of the menu messages.The information available through the service is presented  as follows:

• Stock Quotes.
• News Center:  Weather, Traffic, Business, Technology, Entertainment News, Sports Update, Lottery & Time.
• Sports: All major professional and college sports including a couple of unexpected choices like Boxing and Soccer.
• Entertainment: Movies, Horoscopes, Soap Operas & Blackjack.
• Travel: Driving Directions & Taxi.
• Popular Shortcuts: A short list of the above.

I cannot see using most of the offering from this service unless I am stuck in traffic without a radio, or at a dentist reception area without magazines. However, there were a couple of choices that were useful, for example the movie listings. It turns out that you are actually transferred to the 1-800-FANDANGO service (1-800-326-3264) which is run by the same company as 1-800-555-TELL (Tellme)  Fandango is a great service for movie goers, whether you access it from the web or your phone. Once you find a theater playing the movie you want to see you can buy your tickets through the service. There is a charge of $1.00 per ticket which may make a lot of sense if you plan to attend a popular movie. I believe that when you prepay for your ticket you can walk right to the theater box office or the ticket taker bypassing the dreaded movie lines.

I also thought that the Traffic service would be useful. It turns out that 1-800-555-TELL directs you to 511 which is a program from the U.S. Department of Transportation that intends to be like a 411 for all things that are traveler related. Unfortunately, because traffic and traveler information is mainly provided by a hodge-podge of State agencies, 511 is little more than a menu system for navigating through a State's DOT (i.e. CA DOT.) Nevertheless, I was successful in obtaining road conditions for my locale and I have to admit that unless I was doing it on the Internet, it would have never occurred to me to try to get the same information via phone.

Of all the service choices offered by 1-800-555-TELL, the one I really wanted to try was the Driving Directions. I failed miserably because of the speech recognition problems. I became really frustrated when I kept running out of my call time allowance which is about 4 minutes. I believe that one of the problems with speech recognition has to do with the prevalence of Spanish names for cities and streets in most of the US Southwest.

Just when I was about to give up on 1-800-555-TELL, I decided to try Blackjack and thoroughly enjoyed being called a "looser" by my taunting dealer, none other than Sean Connery!

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Unless you are a teenager, using SMS to communicate is an exercise in futility. You can pretend to be up to speed and learn the lingo but wouldn't it be better if you could send a well formed text message that you could type? Like an email but not an email because although most business people can access their emails from their phones not everyone has this capability. It turns out that you can send a text message to a special email address and it will be received as SMS by any cell phone. The special email address depends on the recipient's carrier but it always starts with the full cell phone number as in "1" + Area Code + Phone Number (i.e. 19495551212 for (949) 555-1212). Following are most of the SMS email addresses for the US:

• AT&T:
  FullCellPhoneNumber@mmode.com
• Cingular:
  FullCellPhoneNumber@cingularme.com
• Nextel:
  FullCellPhoneNumber@messaging.nextel.com
• SprintPCS:
  FullCellPhoneNumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
• T-Mobile:
  FullCellPhoneNumber@tmomail.net
• Verizon:
  FullCellPhoneNumber@vtext.com
• Virgin-Mobile:
  FullCellPhoneNumber@vmobl.com

Of course, the above list assumes that you know your recipient's carrier. If you don't, you can use teleflip  (FullCellPhoneNumber@teleflip.com) The emails are restricted to 160 characters which is really an SMS size restriction. If you are using Firefox there is a teleflip extension but I think the ultimate browser-email-SMS-cellphone application is Google Send to Phone which is a Firefox extension that allows one to send web page content or anything else via SMS. It's cool because you can select the content from your current webpage and quickly send it via SMS to a cell phone by simply clicking the cute icon on your Firefox toolbar. And you are not restricted to 160 characters but can send up to 800 characters that are received as 5 separate text messages. All email to SMS services will result in standard SMS charges to the recipient.

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Paul English came up with the IVR Cheat Sheet™ which has been widely publicized by blogs and the news media because of the originality and usefulness of his idea. He created a list of major US companies, their 800 number and more importantly he documented the "steps to find a human" so that you won't have to suffer IVR (interactive voice response) hell or be subsequently aggravated by the long wait for a Customer Service representative. The conventional wisdom is that companies automate their systems to discourage an actual connection to a human operator. It will be interesting to see if companies adjust their system to adapt to Paul's hack. He seems to understand how telephony systems are put together and will probably figure out any changes to IVR configurations. He is also counting on getting feedback from the public at large to keep his useful database up to date. Paul also a page with other great phone tips.

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Mobiledia provides a great Cell Phone Reception and Tower Search utility which is even integrated with Google Maps. It is an excellent way to determine the best carrier for your locale or to check for tower proximity which might prove invaluable when looking for good reception in a new area. Mobiledia allows this utility to be incorporated into any webpage, free of charge.

All carriers have their coverage maps but if you have a GSM phone, GSM World has the most complete GSM Coverage Maps and Roaming Information to my knowledge.

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Google Mobile provides an interesting array of tools if one has web access through the cell phone. It includes Gmail, a personalized Google homepage and Google Local for mobile which unfortunately does not currently work with Nextel or BREW enabled phones (Verizon, Alltel, US Cellular) or Palm devices. Most carriers include their own personalized mobile homepage and there are quite a number of interesting alternatives such as Yahoo Mobile.  What is unique about Google Mobile services is that it provides Google SMS which is like the 1-800-555-TELL service except it is all via SMS. You submit queries to Google from your cell phone via SMS and Google responds back with useful information. I will probably not use this service much because I think I need to have a cheat sheet to properly form the queries. And if I have to access a cheat sheet, I would probably need access to my laptop, in which case I would use the real thing!

I don't use the web browser on my cell phone and I often wonder if a Blackberry or a Treo would better serve my telecomunication needs. Sounds like a topic for a future blog entry!

Labels: cell, wireless