Standing PC-to-Phone on Its Head
Thought you'd heard about (or tried) every communications wrinkle under the sun? Think again. PDA Street talked today with Warner Johnson, President of 2speak, Inc., a company that has recently launched a new way to use computers and phones (including all the types of phones we write about here) to get messages across the hall, across town, or across the globe.
PDA2speak is a system that moves IP-based messages that start as e-mails and end up as voicemails. How does it work?
You go to the website
www.pda2speak.com and type in a modest amount of information—including your name, your e-mail address, the number of your cellphone or other smartphone, a Subject line, and the recipient's e-mail address. (PDA2speak will remember most of this on subsequent visits) —then click the big SEND button and sit back.
Within a short time (a few seconds, according to Johnson), your phone will ring, whereupon you speak your message and hang up. It is digitally recorded and sent off—to as many as 50 designated recipients. The recipient gets a notification via e-mail, clicks a link, and hears your message, played back over the computer's sound system.
What are the advantages of this unconventional (to say the least) method of communication? Well, if you thought "low cost," you wouldn't be wrong—we'll get back to that. But here are some other reasons Johnson enumerated:
First, it's technically about as simple as it could be. You have a phone; you have a PC. There's no software to download, install, and maintain.
Second, as mentioned, you can gang messages to large numbers of recipients—quite handy for certain types of communications, for example, alerting your staff that "I'll be in a cab, heading to the airport for the next 20 minutes, and available by cell for the next hour and a half. My flight leaves at 4:30 and lands at 7:17."
Third, it makes a permanent record (like an e-mail) for future reference. (Parenthetically, Johnson mentioned that stockbrokers and physicians, in particular, have expressed special enthusiasm for PDA2speak, because it lets them deliver reports, diagnoses, and similar important information "of record" quickly and inexpensively.) Oh, by the way. you get a copy of each PDA2speak message, as well as those you sent it to.
Fourth—and this may be a minor point—you're accustomed to using a phone; you've been doing it all your life. Speaking into a phone is natural; speaking into a microphone is not. A comfort issue, which will matter more to some than others.
Getting back to the cost issue, PDA2speak bills users a follows.
* A monthly billing fee of $0.95 for any month you used the service.
* A 4 cent per minute recording fee
* A 10 cent per message delivery fee.
That's it. The company can also provide voice-to-voice connections, worldwide, over its own VoIP backbone, at very low rates. That's likely to be interesting to many who do lots of international calling, but it's not as revolutionary as PC-to-phone on its head.
