Google Voice – the new Newton?

Back in the day, I had an Apple Newton PDA which was an early, stylus-based (and quite large, by today’s standards) handheld computer.  It was pretty cool but one of the love/hate attributes was its handwriting recognition.  You’d write clearly (or so you thought) but the Newton would mangle the words, creating a nonsense sentence.  This became a joke that was featured in the Doonesbury comic strip and other pop culture outlets.  A classic Newton joke:

Q: How many Newtons does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Farm.

Google Voice

I’ve been using Google Voice for a while now, which is a great, free service that lets you use one, central phone number that can be dynamically routed to whatever other number you like.  One of the most interesting features is that it will allow you to “screen” incoming calls and choose whether to accept them, send them to voice mail, or send them to voice mail while you listen in to what they are saying (you can press a key to take the call if what they say is interesting).

Additionally, you can make long distance calls through Google Voice for “free” (you make a call via Google’s site and it “patches you in” so you don’t incur long distance charges).

Promises unfulfilled

One other feature that holds great promise is one in which Google Voice will transcribe your voice mails to text and email them to you.  This makes it easier to About this feature, I say “holds great promise” because it doesn’t quite have the transcription accuracy that makes this a killer app.  For example, consider this Newton-esque transcription of one of my voice mails:

Pretty hard to tell what this means.  To be fair, the bold text is the part of the transcription they had high confidence in, while the gray text is lower-confidence transcription (and they got the phone number right).

I’m hoping this feature improves – this is one promise I’d love to see them fulfill!  I’d love to be able to route all of my voice mail into my inbox for processing along with my emails.

If you love something, set it free. If it comes back…

I’ve been heads-down at a conference these past several days, so I’ve been quiet here on the blog (though I’ve been active on Twitter, as some of you may have seen).  I have some pent-up posts that I’ll be writing up in the next few days.  My nice, long plane ride ahead tomorrow would be ideal for that, wouldn’t it?  Some of the items in the hopper:

• Interesting thoughts after attending a talk by Stephen M. R. Covey on “The Speed of Trust” – not just the book, but the awesome concepts underlying the book.
• A review of a radically improved version of the Netcentrics “Getting Things Done” add-in for Outlook.
• A couple of gadget-related reviews, and a couple of other books.

In the mean time, you might enjoy my latest post on the newly re-designed “Joyful Jubilant Learning” site about “Early Abandonment and Boomerangs” (hint – it’s sort of about social media, sort of about gadgets, and may strike a nerve with you).

So what does the title of this post mean?  It’s an obscure connection to the “Early Abandonment and Boomerangs” metaphor.  At least they connect in my mind.  If they don’t connect for you, forget I said that, and just enjoy the other post…