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Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

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Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#141

Post by idlewords »

eevilspock wrote: post #139
rsync wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Maciej Ceglowski (idlewords) also calls for an "anti-free-software movement" in Don't Be A Free User: https://blog.pinboard.in/2011/12/don_t_be_a_free_user/" His examples and his cause have nothing at all to do with free software. It's an almost comically clumsy misnomer.

By "free" he means as in “free beer” not as in “free speech”, i.e. not what RMS means by "free software". When he writes "anti-free-software movement", he is purposefully playing with the ambiguity of the term[1] and playing off the FOSS movement's use of the term. He does so tongue-in-cheek, but for clarity I should not have quoted that part. My mistake. "Don't Be A Free User" means don't be a user that doesn't pay.…

I dislike ads and think they are harmful for other reasons, if that makes you feel better! But they are kind of orthogonal to the argument I was making here.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#142

Post by commentzorro »

cnst wrote: post #129
slg wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you can compare your lock-in to the telcos. The telcos are for the most part commoditized. I use my phone the same way whether my phone is on Verizon or AT&T. However, you are not exactly offering a commoditized service and I would venture a guess that you don't want to considering your pricing compared to your competitors. You are asking that we make a fundamental change to how we use our phone. Instead…

You have a good point, however, I think Google Voice is already quite good at doing quite similar kind of filtering that the site talks about; as such, I don't even see what kind of value this service is supposed to provide, especially at 15$/mo. In the absence of Google Voice, this service might be interesting; however, otherwise, why would I pay 15*12 = 180 USD/year for something that I can already get for free?

FWIW, It's likely that Google Voice will be rolled into the back end of a larger but not free service sometime in the near future.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/07/0...

Google Fi looks interesting but it appears it will work via your cell phone rather than PC and/or land line (via, for example, Obihai's Obi200 and ObiTalk ... very highly recommended for GV as it is now). And there's Google Fi's price of $30 per month.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#143

Post by austenallred »

TodPunk wrote: post #118
austenallred wrote: post #52

801? Are you guys still in Utah?

We are. Neither of us grew up here, but the tech is great and the cost of living is fantastic comparatively. So we can be much more lean.

We should meet up. Email me

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#144

Post by rdl »

There's a fair bit of lockin here, but ~no technical information on the website (which is also pretty sparse).

Is it just "we'll run a PBX and backhaul your calls to you over SIP to a client on your phone?" Is it an MVNO? Is it forwarding between PSTN?

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#145

Post by TodPunk »

tyingq wrote: post #95
jv22222 wrote: post #88

If they control your number, could they not listen to all your calls, if they so wanted?

Is there a service provider for which that isn't true?

There is not, especially where POTS is concerned. If you want private calls, you don't want old POTS interactivity at all (and there are services for this). If you don't involve POTS at all, this become easy to achieve.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#146

Post by TodPunk »

ttctciyf wrote: post #140
TodPunk wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doable, but voice recognition is severely lacking outside of targeted small dictionaries, and a simple wav file can beat it. I wouldn't rely on it for a long while.

I meant like a varying question - "which is not an animal - zebra, teapot, monkey, .." so yeah, if your AI can pick the right wav file it's beatable..

In that case, yes, it would be interesting to make a system to verify such and probably doable in the short term (ignoring the UI issues which are separate). The problem still remains the same that your speech recognition is going to be very spotty on untrained processing, so you can at best (key word there) match maybe 500 words on one accent pool. This means you have a limited set of questions and it does make it a barrier to entry, but certainly not unbeatable and definitely much more in favor of the AI programmer.

This is also why your average big-company automated attendant is so bad at interpreting what you want outside of the 5 common things people want to talk about (most of which I can do online, so it's never what I'm there for) and again sadly only if you're in the more common US American English accent pool. Southern accents tend to get squelched pretty bad and that's just the beginning of accents common in the US.

One could conceivably target an individuals desired accent recognition so you could let the user say "Most of my callers speak in an X accent" and then get a little more accurate for that pool of callers, but this also means installing disparate systems for recognition, each of which are quite expensive computationally.

This is a deeply interesting problem space, though, and if you're interested there's quite a bit of discussion over it in the sphinx project and several research communities.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#147

Post by eevilspock »

idlewords wrote: post #141
eevilspock wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By "free" he means as in “free beer” not as in “free speech”, i.e. not what RMS means by "free software". When he writes "anti-free-software movement", he is purposefully playing with the ambiguity of the term[1] and playing off the FOSS movement's use of the term. He does so tongue-in-cheek, but for clarity I should not have quoted that part. My mistake. "Don't Be A Free User" means don't be a user that doesn't pay.…

I dislike ads and think they are harmful for other reasons, if that makes you feel better! But they are kind of orthogonal to the argument I was making here.

Whoever down-voted you can't stand that you are of the opinion that ads are harmful. Sheesh. Since I up-voted you there are more than one.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#148

Post by hellbanner »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #105
hellbanner wrote: post #56

Looks cool. I've found that asynchronous voice chat programs (WeChat got huge in China, then the West got WhatsApp, Nextel etc) make for much easier voice communication. There's zero overhead of waiting for a ring & voicemail message and a beep -- just press a button & speak. I'd love to see this integrate with phone lines but I doubt the feasibility.

I hate receiving voice messages. Sure, it's quick for the sender, but it's inconvenient for me. Reading a messages is better than listening because: 1) I can easily re-read a couple of words I didn't parse properly the first time, or which are details (like addresses). 2) I can read pretty much anywhere, without disturbing anyone around me. 3) I can read much faster than I can listen. Thankfully, only a couple of my…

Personally I've found voice messages incredibly useful during transit (texting & driving isn't safe, and riding a bus bouncing over potholes is difficult to type.

WeChat supports address sharing which integrates to mapping, which works well. It support regular text messages to, and voice calls -- so your options are covered.

Re: Phone Janitor – Take control of your phone number

#149

Post by rahimnathwani »

hellbanner wrote: post #148
rahimnathwani wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate receiving voice messages. Sure, it's quick for the sender, but it's inconvenient for me. Reading a messages is better than listening because: 1) I can easily re-read a couple of words I didn't parse properly the first time, or which are details (like addresses). 2) I can read pretty much anywhere, without disturbing anyone around me. 3) I can read much faster than I can listen. Thankfully, only a couple of my…

Personally I've found voice messages incredibly useful during transit (texting & driving isn't safe, and riding a bus bouncing over potholes is difficult to type. WeChat supports address sharing which integrates to mapping, which works well. It support regular text messages to, and voice calls -- so your options are covered.

I'm not dissing the function. I'm amazed at how well WeChat's various functions (address sharing, video/voice calling, money transfer, ...) work. I just don't find voice messages useful for me as the recipient. The people who have sent me voice messages don't own cars so they have no excuse!
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