When a Cell Phone Is Not Enough

The Personal Virtual Assistant will do your bidding--just say the word.

Michael S. Lasky, PC World

Got a question or comment? Write to Michael S. Lasky.

You'd think that a cell phone, a PDA, laptop and desktop PCs, and even a paper notebook would be enough to keep me up to speed with my appointments, contacts, and reminders.

Nope. I still can't keep track. I need a secretary, too. (Don't we all!) Of course, reality sets right in about a millisecond after I have that dream--which is why I was thrilled by the idea of a PVA. That's a Personal Voice Assistant, a virtual electronic Stepford Wife who does my bidding and whose upkeep is but pennies a day.

Z-Tel Communications, an alternative local and long-distance provider, previously offered its PVA to its residential phone customers and has now expanded it to a national service that anyone can sign up for, regardless of whether they use Z-tel's phone service. For $5 a month and 6.9 cents a minute (after a free 30-minute trial), you get a phone-enabled contact management service--sort of an automated secretary. While there have been similar services like this in the past, they were expensive and arduous to set up. Z-Tel's Z-Line PVA proved to be a snap.

After signing up on the Z-Tel Web site, I was assigned my own private Web cubicle where I uploaded my contacts and my personal information, such as various phone numbers where I could be called or paged (cell phone, office, home, etc.), in order of preference. I was able to import my contacts from Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, or Yahoo Mail. Any others I typed into my PVA address book. The service also assigned me a personal toll-free 800 number.

I was able to put my PVA through the "ringer" immediately. For example, when I was expecting a call from my doctor that I couldn't miss, I gave his assistant my 800 number. When the doctor called back, my "assistant" (a pleasant, unruffled female voice) asked him to wait while she tried to locate me. I was in a meeting in my office, so my cell phone was off, but the next try--to my office desk line--worked, and I connected with the doctor.

Group V-Mail

The Tele-mail feature lets me send a voice message to one or more numbers in my contact list. When the recipients answer, my message is played. This is convenient if I want to send the same message to a group of people--I only have to create it once, verbally tell the PVA which names on my contact list to send it to, and I'm done. Tele-mail e-mails me a report with a list of the intended recipients who got the message, when they got it, and at which number.

The Notify Me service alerts me at my e-mail address and my paging number every time a voice-mail message has been left at my PVA phone line. But when I tried this out with a 5-second message ("This is a test"), all I heard was 2 minutes of static. (It's just so hard getting good help these days. They give you nothing but static!) But that proved to be an anomaly: The rest of my messages were clear.

I can retrieve my voice mail either as digital audio file attachments to e-mail (this requires RealNetworks' RealPlayer) or as conventional voice messages over the phone. The latter works like regular voice mail, except I can give voice commands to skip to the next message, replay, or delete, and the "assistant" instantly complies.

The PVA also lets me make voice-activated calls through my Z-Tel 800 number, which can be useful if I don't know the person's number and don't have my phone book handy. I simply say "Call Fred" and it dials. Of course, my cell phone does this too, so this feature is no biggie unless you don't have it on your cell service.

One feature that really is worthwhile is Conference Calling, which lets me call multiple people (at 6.9 cents per minute per person) beyond the three people my cell-phone plan's conferencing allows. And, once again, I don't have to dial each person I want to conference with. My PVA dials the number and gives the go-ahead when everybody is on line.

Obviously, this service is not for everybody. But if you have a hectic schedule and need to be available (even when you are not), the PVA is indispensable. Now if I could only get it to clean my house.