Skydeck and Google Voice

I chanced upon the skydeck service- which provides several very useful features for your cell phone: voicemail speech to text, online call/text logging, contact backup and a VoIP client (in the premium version)- to name a few of the prevalent ones. One very useful feature for me was unknown caller ID lookup.

During the setup wizard, the skydeck client is installed on your phone (via SMS link). The software detects the type of phone you are using and installs the appropriate client; this worked on both my personal T-Mobile G1 and my work Blackberry Storm with no issues.

The client allows the phone to communicate with the Skydeck service and transfer information about incoming/outgoing calls. It also can log into your online carrier account (if you allow it to by providing your cell phone number and password) to pull more detailed information on your calls.

They have added ‘Google Voice Mash-up’ instructions for using Google Talk as external email for the the free client; giving speech-to-text (via Google transcriptions) to the Skydeck basic client (the premium is $14.95/month). This also allows the use of the filtering/screening rules through Google Talk as you will be using it as your primary cell voicemail. This scenario is great if you have a large volume of calls on your cell phone and you need to keep detailed logs/history (say if you are in sales/support).

The Skydeck software will determine the carrier your phone is on (Verizon, in this case) and provide setup instructions specific for that carrier:

During testing I would call my cell phone and it would ring 8-10 times before finally going to voicemail and transcribing the message; 4-5 rings on the phone and an additional 4-5 rings once it was forwarded to Google Talk. Turning on ‘Do Not Disturb’ under the Google Talk options screens forwards all calls to voicemail and reduces this to 5-6 rings before reaching voicemail.

Another very discouraging issue I found is that T-Mobile FlexPay plans do not allow any forwarding for voicemail; which makes these services useless for my personal cell phone.