Hawaii Talks Telecom

How many of us can really read a telecom bill? It seems to be filled with codes and secret information that only phone companies know. The truth is, I used to be one of you! I used to think that phones bills were encrypted, and that it was made to confuse us regular folks. In reality though, phone bills are complicated BUT not impossible to read.

Here are a couple of tips on how you can take control and interpret your own bill! The first thing you need to know is what service did you order? If you do not know what service you requested, the best thing to do is to review the contract you signed when you first requested the service. No copy? No problem! The Customer Care department at your service provider will have access to your account and records and can easily remind you what service you ordered.

Now that you know the details of service you SHOULD be billed for, here comes the interpretation part. I know that, sometimes, when staring at your phone bill, you might feel like pulling out your hair. You think to yourself, “How can this be? I ordered 1 line and there are 3 items I am being billed for!” This is because phone companies usually break down your service into line items. The most common thing in your bill that you will see but don’t understand is Subscriber Line Charge a.k.a SLC (pronounced “Slick”). This is a monthly fee paid by telephone subscribers per voice channel. Why do you have to pay a SLC charge? The SLC charge helps phone companies maintain the telephone network that you use. E911 maybe something else that you see on your bill, this is actually a GOOD service to have on your phone service. This service actually dispatches your service address location to emergency responders when you place an emergency call to 911. This is good, in case you are unable to speak during an emergency; the responders will already have your location and can react immediately. See http://www.fcc.gov/pshs/services/911-services/ for more information on this service.

Phone companies also use industry standard terms instead of layman’s terms on their bills. This is not done to confuse the user but it is used to ensure accuracy of billing and documentation of services. A great resource when searching for the meaning of the words on your bill is: http://www.businessdictionary.com. Once you understand what each line item is referring to, you will now be able to understand your bill!

-Jolene Goh

Google is awesome. Even checking on some basic information can lead to finding some interesting things.

For example, I have two websites for you this week.

http://tirs.us/which was formerly http://www.tndatabase.com/ lets you look up some basic (very basic and honestly information you probably won’t care about but might matter to your phone service provider) information on who “owns” a telephone number.

Another, and really I think a better, website to look up this kind of information is http://www.localcallingguide.com/ 

Now you might ask what you would use these websites for. Well if you’re thinking about changing providers you’re going to want to make sure you can “port” your numbers. That is, take them with you when you switch providers so that you don’t have to change your telephone number. There are certain rules for number porting. For example you can only port numbers to “like providers.” So by law you can take your number from one landline provider to another, or from one cellular provider to another cellular provider, but not from a say a cellular carrier to a land line.

You might also want to look up a toll free number for your business and see of someone has already taken that number. Or you’re getting lots of calls from a 1-800 number and you want to know who’s number it is.

In an earlier post I talked a little about voice mail transcription services (speech to text) and gave a couple of links to different speech to text services. I got another interesting one in my Gmail account today slightly by accident.

A while back I signed up for a GrandCentral account. GrandCentral billed itself as a “one telephone number for everything” service. It worked very much in the way Pacific LightNet’s SimRing feature works. You give people one telephone number and program that number to ring a bunch of other phones, like your cell phone or your home phone, when that number is called. GrandCentral works very much in the same way. However they didn’t offer any local Hawaii numbers, so I was stuck with a 323 area code telephone number (Los Angeles, CA) which was fine at the time because I had lived in LA for a while and had friends there.

Google has since bought out GrandCentral and is in the process of re-releasing it as Google Voice (is there anything that Google won’t do? I mean seriously, I expect to see Google Taxi soon or someone flipping burgers at Google King). And one of the new features added to Google Voice is a voice mail transcription service. When a caller leaves you a voice mail at your Google Voice telephone number the system will transcribe that voice mail and email you (to your Gmail account) a pretty accurate text as well as links to the actual audio. It even lets you download the voice mail as an MP3 audio file. And Google voice will also do SMS messages, thought I don’t really like SMS so I haven’t tried that one yet.

As an example, here’s a link to a test voicemail I left myself and here’s the transcription that was provided. The transcription itself took just a couple of minutes and seemed automatic. Now I don’t know whether they’re doing this in software or if they have a building full of operators listening and typing but it was quite impressive. And, here’s the transcribed text:

“Hello this is reed this is a test voice mail message it is Wednesday April eighth two thousand and nine and I’d like to see how well the voice mail transcription service works thank you.”

I want to note the first part of that “Hello this is reed.” The system seemed smart enough to be able to determine the context and choose the appropriate word “reed” instead of “read” which seems pretty nifty to me. Granted, there’s no punctuation or capital letters, but it’s still pretty good.

Google Voice is still in beta and not publicly released but if you’re already a member of GrandCentral you can upgrade/update your account to Google Voice to get this service and it looks like if you’re already a member you can invite others so they can join.  Now as far as I know they still don’t have local Hawaii numbers but since most cell phones don’t charge for long distance anymore and since your Pacific LightNet services come with very reasonable long distance rates (sometimes thousands of minutes bundled into your services) using a mainland number may not be too big of an issue for you.

As Google Voice gets released, expect to see more on the blog, I’m quite impressed thus far. I expect that one day I’ll be able to use my Google Phone with Google Voice to call a Google Taxi to take me from Google International Airport to the Google Hotel when I have to go to conferences. Oh and of more interesting note, as I’m spell checking this I just found out that WordPress’ spelling dictionary doesn’t know the word “blog” nor does it know “Google.”

One of the nice features of PLNI’s Message Center service is the ability to receive an email and have the system read that email back to you over the phone (text to speech). However, I’ve also been asked about different services for text to speech service. In particular, say you get a voice mail message but want it transcribed, either for record keeping or to save the text. This is known as speech to text and unfortunately it’s not something our system is capable of doing at this time.

However, I’ve come across a couple of neat services that do offer speech to text and they’re pretty accurate. The first one is a service called Jott. This one I find useful for remembering little notes to myself. An ex girlfriend of mine is a nurse and she carries around this voice recorder all day to make little notes to herself about different patients. It’s a great idea but it’s one more piece of gear for me to carry around. Jott let’s me call a number, record a message then it transcribes that message and email’s it to me. And in particular, I like Jott because it comes with different levels of service, one of which is FREE!. And you get those messages as emails or SMS messages. sigh…you kids and your texting. http://www.jott.com

Another service is phonewire. It works well and the voice recognition is pretty good but it is about $30 per month so it may not be for everyone. I do have to say though that I liked the flexibility of this service and word for word, the transcription service is pretty accurate and I didn’t have to train the voice recognition software, so they must have pretty decent software running the service. http://www.phonewire.com/

Now I know a lot of you kids with the Facebook and the LinkedIn like to get all fancy and Web 2.0 with new technology and if that’s you I would suggest SpinVox. It’s got a lot of really nice features that tie into a pretty slick website and solid user interface. Plus it gives you some trial time before you have to pay for anything. Now I should be a bit honest here, I didn’t try all the features of SpinVox. I tried out the memo service which is kind of like what Jott does and it seems that SpinVox is geared more towards a UK based or international caller but the service worked great and the transcription was pretty solid http://www.spinvox.com/

And finally, I was playing around with my friend Sam’s iPhone. I need to get an iPhone now but he uses this service called PhoneTag which was pretty neat. Same as the others, it transcribes his voicemail to text, but then he has the text sent to his iPhone, I didn’t check to see if they were text message or as email, I’m guessing email because SMS is limited to 160 characters. But PhoneTag performed beautifully. It seemed okay with Hawaiian and Asian names. Not perfect but better than some of the others; and returned the transcribed messages very quickly. http://www.phonetag.com/