Electronic mail by phone? I know what you’re thinking: it’s another ploy to send junk-mail to travelers. You sign up for the service and then field a constant stream of unsolicited advertising messages.
Not this time. Orchestrate E-mail by Phone is a legit service that turns your electronic messages into computer-generated speech, temporarily liberating you from a laptop computer. It also lets you respond to an electronic message by phone without the benefit of a keypad.
Orchestrate was developed by Atlanta telecommunications service provider Premiere Technologies to compete directly with services such as CoolMail and SayMail. But the Orchestrate solution sets itself apart from its rivals by integrating other messaging features and not subsidizing its service with “spam” messages, according to the company.
Accessing e-mail from a phone with Orchestrate is no more difficult than picking up voice mail. You dial a local number and key in a password. The system tells you how many message are waiting and prompts you to either play, delete or forward the contents of the mailbox.
Toggling between e-mails is simple, and so is responding – although the recipient must have a RealPlayer program, version 5.0 or higher – installed to listen to your comeback. The dispatches are rendered in a hollow male voice that’s sometimes a challenge to understand. I’m told that the company is working on making the voice more natural-sounding with hopes of phasing out the robotic speech soon. If all of this seems like nothing more than enhanced voice mail, you’re not too far from the truth. Premiere operates an extensive voice mail network in 4,500 US cities, and it sees this product – and another service that allows users to be reached by voice, fax or e-mail through one phone number – as its way of capitalizing on the convergence of telephony and the Internet.
At $19.95 per user per month, Orchestrate’s voice-to-text system isn’t overly costly, but you should carefully consider this service before signing up. It isn’t without its limitations. Each message is restricted to three minutes, meaning that if someone starts to ramble, they’ll get clipped mid-sentence. The only way to receive the rest of the note is to log on with your computer. Also, e-mails are only stored for a week– so use it or lose it.
I can think of some travelers for whom Orchestrate will work well. Those without computers who need to use e-mail but refuse to buy a PC (and who can blame them?) might want to check out this product. You literally don’t need a computer to retrieve e-mail. Not to sound like a broken record here, but it merits repeating that all of your replies will go over as audio files not text – so this probably isn’t the most elegant solution from a recipient’s point of view. Alex Balentine, a network integration consultant based in Atlanta who helped beta-test Orchestrate and has used it for the last nine months, believes many other travelers will benefit from the system too. “When I travel, I used to put an auto-reply message on my mailbox,” he remembers. “Now, I forward my e-mails to the Orchestrate account, and I use filtering software to pick out the important ones. It keeps me in the loop.”
But is Orchestrate a substitute for a laptop? Nah. Not for most of us.
People will continue to haul their weighty computers with them, and if they use the text-to-voice system, they’ll do so as a last resort. Maybe at an airport layover or between meetings, when it’s impractical to pull out the notebook. It’s not that Orchestrate is flawed. It isn’t. It’s just that there are so many things it can’t do, and probably never will be able to do. Like open a complicated spreadsheet, a Web site or display graphics or streaming video.
I find it somewhat ironic that a 19th century technology is being used to enhance a 20th century innovation in this way. Isn’t one of the implied promises of e-mail to render phones obsolete? And now e-mail users find themselves once again dependent on the telephone, essentially bringing us back to where we were a decade ago.
Maybe it’s not that bad. Orchestrate is just offering one more way of communicating. Leveraging its network of voice-mail services was a smart thing that¹s bound to pay off. Even so, I’d rather take a step forward into the uncertain world of wireless than a step backward into the tried-and-true realm of the wired.
Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.
Elliott is consumer advocate 
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