Dialing Phone Numbers with Minimal Effort
Posted on June 13th, 2006
I was thinking about how to make the process of dialing a phone number easier. Here's how it is right now:
- Decide to place a call, maybe in response to a newly arrived email.
- Try to recall the number from memory. Fail to do so.
- Go to the address book.
- Find the callee in the address book.
- Find the appropriate number (cell? work? home?) for the callee.
- Pick up phone and dial manually.
- Start talking.
That's tedious. It would be a lot more convenient to jump from the first step to the last step and skip most if not all the crap in between. But how?
Speed dial might work. While it's fine for numbers you call frequently, it doesn't cover the numbers you call infrequently. Speed dialing also presumes you've learned how to add numbers to your phone in the first place, which might be a gamble for some. Plus, what if you're using a different phone?
Voice-based dialing seems like it would be the perfect solution. You pick up the phone and say the callee's name, then let your telephone system figure out the right name-to-number mapping. I'm not too keen on all that because it's hard to do well-- what do I look like, TellMe? If there's a change for misinterpretation or miscommunication, no matter how small, the aggravation factor is probably going to wash out any convenience.
Asterisk has a Management API that makes the mechanics of making a call pretty simple once you have the number in hand. There are several ways to implement click-to-call functionality-- I've been using a bookmarklet which initiates calls based on whatever text you've highlighted on whatever web page you're viewing. It's almost a complete solution, except for the fact that it hinges on having already located the number to call. It might work if you kept your address book on the web in something like Gmail, but not everyone does or would want to. Regardless, the steps involved in identifying a number to call are still pretty much as they are in the list above. A bookmarklet helps shortcut the dialing process but not the number finding process.
The only other approach I can think of is autocomplete via a web-based application dedicated to call-making. You'd want to keep your address book wherever it is, since it probably already integrates with your email client and losing that connection would be lame. Periodically exporting your contacts to a VCF file and then uploading that file to the dialing application ought to be enough to make it usable.
There are still disadvantages however. The main one is that you need to be in front of your computer to use this thing in the first place. You also need to periodically synchronize your contacts.
Maybe speed dial is the least worst alternative of the bunch.