For as much as I’m in awe of the cleverness of GrandCentral, there’s one breakthrough feature that wooed me more than any other — and then broke my tech-loving heart when it stopped working: in-call recording.
As a journalist, I conduct interviews every day; it used to be that if I wanted to record a call, I need to put a pickup earphone in my ear and connect it to a digital voice recorder. That solution worked well enough, but when it didn’t, chaos. Interviewing a top executive of Dell two weeks ago, the recorder inexplicably beeped itself into standby, leaving me scrambling to take hand-written notes about Dell’s intricate (and painfully specific) evironmental policies. Not cool.
That’s why GrandCentral’s call recording seemed like such a boon; unlimited call recording at the simple push of a button. It works like this: push the four key during a call, and there’s an announcement to both parties that the call is being logged. After that, it shows up in your Web voice mailbox just like a voicemail, where you can listen to it from anywhere.
Except that you can’t. For the first few weeks I used call recording, it worked nicely. Then it stopped shunting the recordings to my mailbox, even though the “recording” announcement came through on the line. Then pressing the four key stopped initiating recording at all.
At first I thought it was the fault of my iPhone — damned touch-keys and their illusions — but then I tried it on BlackBerry, Motorola, and Nokia devices to no avail. I went back to using my digital voice recorder, and I take fewer calls on GrandCentral because I can’t record them.
When Google decided to update GrandCentral to a Google-branded product, it made a tacit promise to GrandCentral users: that the product would function with Google-grade efficacy and reliability. I haven’t yet upgraded to Google Voice from GrandCentral, but when I do, I’ll be able to see if Google audited the site’s functionalty before slapping a new name on it — or whether the change was purely re-branding. Let’s hope it’s the former.
