Q: What problem is Phone Amego intended to solve?
A: Phone Amego is designed to help you make the most of your phones by providing on-screen
caller ID, click-to-dial, and Macintosh integration.
What's different about Phone Amego is:
(1) It does both dialing and caller ID.
(2) It embraces the iPhone and the Internet.
(3) It works with many common phones (cell phones, landlines, Google Voice, and VoIP).
(4) It includes a lightweight CRM designed to work with other tools as needed.
(5) It focusses on Mac-to-phone integration, not trying to be another phone, or answering
machine.
Imagine you spend much of your day sitting in front of a Mac (like me). Your phone might be in
your pocket, purse, or plugged into a charger. When the phone rings, a little window pops up on
your Mac's screen to tell you who is calling. If you don't want to answer right now, you can click
"End Call" to send the call directly to voice mail, or send a short SMS to say you will call back in
20 minutes.
If you sometimes forget to take your phone off vibrate, the on-screen caller ID will help alert you
when you have a call.
If a client calls, you can press one button to bring up your calendar showing your prevous calls
and your next appointment. Or pull up your Emails with Janet Smith.
To place a call, you can click on a number in your Address Book (or Daylite) to have your
computer dial it for you, or open the Call window and type the first few letters of the name you
want to call. You can dial almost any number that appears on your screen. You can use the
Recent submenu to redial or return a call with a single click.
If you have a landline phone, you can enjoy on screen caller ID and click to dial from any Mac on
your local area network. If you use a VoIP phone service, you can get on screen caller ID, even
when you're on the phone.
With Phone Amego you can organize your call records in a distributed database and pull up caller
information from any networked computer running Phone Amego. Add notes as desired and
have them appear automatically on your other computers the next time that person calls. Great
for tracking calls when different people can answer the phone.
Phone Amego maintains an easy to review call log. With appropriate hardware, you can do full
call accounting for billing or system management.
By focussing on the user experience, Phone Amego offers deep integration many tools overlook.
Google Voice Support
You can dial calls via Google Voice directly from your Address Book. You can send a free SMS
using Google Voice to one or more contacts in your Address Book. This is generally much easier
than using the small keypad on your phone.
If you are new to Google Voice, the idea is to have one number that rings wherever you go
instead of handing out different numbers for where you might be (home, office, cell), and have
one place to keep your voice mail. When you call someone, you want them to see your Google
Voice number, not the number of where you happen to be calling from (so your cell number
remains private). Phone Amego can take care of this for you when you dial a number from your
Address Book.
If you don't have good cell phone reception at home, you can use Google Voice to ring both your
cell phone and home phone at the same time, and answer whichever one is more convenient.
If your Mac doesn't have a modem or you are connected via AirPort, you can use Google Voice as
a wireless dialer. When Phone Amego dials using Google Voice, it connects over the Internet to
ring your phone, and then the phone of the person you are calling. You can dial indirectly from
almost any phone you can answer that has a 10-digit U.S. number connected to an outside line,
including Voice over IP phones.
Google Voice is not a direct replacement for your phone service, but it may allow you to
consolidate your phone services to save you money. For example, if you are a micro business
owner, instead of having a separate office phone, you can have a Google Voice number that
rings your home and/or cell phone. For outgoing calls, Google Voice offers free nationwide long
distance and low international rates (which is one way the service pays for itself). By combining
Google Voice with a VoIP service to receive calls, or a Google Talk compabitle adaptor like the
OBi110, you can get flexible phone service at very low cost compared to traditional alternatives.
For more examples of using Phone Amego, check out my Blog:
Q: How can I get a Google Voice Account?
A: Point your web browser at <http://www.google.com/voice>. Click on "Get an Invite" near the
bottom of the page. I understand invites can take about 2 weeks at the time of this writing. If
you know a Google employee or another Google Voice user, they may have invites to hand out.
Current Google Voice users are gradually being given invites to share with family and friends.
Google Voice is a very popular service so they are expanding it gradually to provide a smooth
rollout. Google Voice is not available outside the U.S. at this time.
Q: Does Phone Amego work with Google 2-step Authentication?
A: Yes, but you'll need to create a "one-time application-specific password" for Phone Amego.