One Ring to Rule Them All

Am I the only one who thinks Google is The Matrix? It's true! Google gives us the most wonderful free stuff--search, e-mail, productivity apps--and all we have to do in return is let it suck our souls.

Yes, Google gets to read my e-mail and many of my work documents. It knows more about me than my blessed wife does. And I'm fine with that, since--so far, anyway--it uses the data benignly, mainly to try to sell me stuff. (Good luck with that.) I am happy to be one of the millions of batteries that power Google. The more it feeds on us, the more it gives us, creating a bountiful world where manna rains from the cloud computers.

The latest miracle from the land of the free is Google Voice, a product that instantly dispatches standard voice mail to the slag heap of obsolescence. Available to selected users since the spring, it's now open to the rest of us. (You can sign up, my little 9 volt, at google.com/voice I'm told you'll be on the waitlist for a week or so.)

What's so great about Voice? It lets you centralize all your phone calls, which you can access from your home, office or cell phone. If you ignore a call, the voice mail is transcribed and sent to you as an e-mail, an SMS or both. Voice also lets you make free conference calls and cheap international calls.

To get started, I used Google's number-finder tool to unearth an available number in my area code that ended in T-I-M-E (8463). Even with that mnemonic, I've been having trouble remembering this universal number I'm supposed to be giving out. Google says it plans to offer number portability at some point, so I could pay $10 to make, say, my cell number my universal number.

Next, I set up my account on a personal Voice Web page, where I linked my home, work and cell numbers to my new T-I-M-E number, causing all those phones to ring simultaneously when anyone calls. Now when my phones ring, I pick up whichever is most convenient. If need be, I can press * to make all my phones ring again and hand the call from my cell to my land line or vice versa.

Google does a passable job of voice recognition and transcription. For instance, when I left a message, "The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth," the transcribed e-mail I received a minute later read, "The Matrix is the world that has been pulled over. Your is to blind you from the truth." I can live with that. I mean, what do you expect for free?