Text To Landline: darned cool
On Tuesday, Sprint announced a Text To Landline feature. I gave it a try, and I think is very clever and well delivered. You send a text message as normal. A few seconds later, the landline rings and you get told that phone # blah-blah has sent you a message, press 1 to hear it. The text to speech is pretty good. Once you hear your message, you can either reply by 5 pre-canned text messages (Yes, No, Please call back, Thank you, Where are you? ) or a voice message. The voice message is cool, you get a number back in the reply SMS and when you call it, you hear the message the person left for you. Another neat feature is that you get a response SMS when the person listens to their Text to Landline message. Handy. This is a trade off - by making me press "1" to receive the message, they can know I have listened, but if they didn't require that, my message would have gone to the persons voicemail. There are pros and cons to both. Here is a recording a made (using my cell phone) of the callback I received: TextToLandlineRecording.wav (101 KB)
You could argue that this feature is silly because I could just call the person. But I don't think so. The advantage of SMS and IM is the non-real time nature of it. I can fire a message, move on to the next thing, then deal with the reply when it comes back. Plus it is private - placing a call is not. Extending SMS/IM paradigm to the landline allows someone to send a message to anyone during a meeting, class, etc. Could be a killer feature for desktop and mobile AIM.