I'm long GMGC and finally got around to signing up for the service myself about a month ago. I got it to synch with Sidekick on the first try, which in itself is a miracle. The system has an extremely high Wow! Factor with people who call it or get an email reply from me via the service. Many of those people either signed up immediately or are wavering and probably will eventually (then again, my peer group is comprised almost entirely of early-adopters and technology savants).
I -have- had some problems with the voice recognition when calling from a digital cellular phone, which is disturbing -- sometimes the failure rate on commands is so high that I just give up. I think they need to spend some major time & money getting that tuned up before the service will really be useful for me -- right now it's more of a novelty.
Some other sore points:
1) it seems to be easy to get stuck if you can't remember a command -- I'd like to see many more command choices for the same action (i.e., I'd like to be able to say "kill it" "delete it" "get rid of it" "erase it" etc to delete a message)
2) you can't originate outgoing email, you can only respond to an incoming email, unless I'm missing something basic. This is a major flaw, obviously.
3) you can't "reply to all", only "reply to sender"
4) I don't think there's a way to do a direct reply to another portico voicemail box -- you'd have to originate an outgoing call to the other user's portico number. Nice for the revenue stream, but in an enterprise setting, "direct connect" would be preferred (sorry, nextel).
hmm, I don't want to sound totally negative. Let me balance out: I think VUI in general is the wave of the future, not just for telco applications. Removing the screen and keyboard from various data appliances will allow them to become compact enough for integration into many, many other applications. GMGC is obviously well ahead of anyone else in that sort of race. RE: using NT vs Unix; well, I'd prefer they use unix, but if it's built on NT, it leads me to believe that magictalk's capabilities may be integrated into NT5 (or whatever they call it when they finally get around to releasing it). That might make our Portico Girl (does she have a name?) as ubiquitous as the You've Got Mail guy. |
