Comments on: Fonolo lets you skip phone menu purgatory

Ever been stuck listening to a computer's voice telling you which buttons to press? Avoid that robotic hell with Fonolo.

Dealing with phone tree menus has long been an annoying and frustrating problem for many consumers. This has been a project we have been working on for quite some time and was behind the start of Click411.com. We have recently launched a dedicated site www.phonetreeshortcuts.com to help solve the phone tree menu misery. Dealing
with phone tree menus is an area that has been without a good solution and now there
are applications to help solve that problem.

[shaiberger]

Hi everyone, I'm the co-founder and CEO of Fonolo. Thanks to all of you who have signed-up for our beta test. It's great to see the interest! We will hand out accounts as soon as we can.

Addressing the above comment... There *are* other sites that have listings of phone tree shortcuts (including the grand-daddy of them all, GetHuman.com). The key to Fonolo is our ability to "Deep Dial" -- we actually connect you directly to the point in the menu that you want.

When you click on a phone menu in the Fonolo interface, Fonolo dials the company, navigates their menu and then calls you back. When you answer, you are connected directly to where you want to go.

Aside from being really convenient, doing it this way gives us two other advantages: First, each time our system Deep Dials for you, it uses speech recognition to confirm that the text of the phone menu hasn't changed since it was last spidered. (That's how we keep the trees fresh.)

Second, by routing the call through our servers, we are able to do maintain an "intelligent call history" for you, along with notes and call recordings. The Deep Dialing and Intelligent Call History work hand-in-hand to empower you as a consumer and make it less frustrating to deal with large companies over the phone.

More info at www.fonolo.com and at my blog www.shaiberger.com.

- Shai Berger

[yorke_and_vedder]

I love the idea of the service you provide! However, I could not find any information about privacy and protection of my data on your site. How will security for notes and call recordings be maintained and what is your policy with regards to your company's access to that information?

Thank you,

Mariano

[shaiberger]

Mariano,

Thanks for the compliment!

Once you log in, you can review our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use. Call Recording is an opt-in service so if it makes you uncomfortable, you are free to use our other features without it.

If you do choose to enable call recording, we will keep the data strictly private and you can delete any recordings you don't want to keep.

- Shai Berger

Fonolo CEO