Initial Thoughts
I’ve been waiting for this for quite some time now. Google Voice was originally a call routing service called Grand Central which Google acquired a couple years ago. It basically allows you to route all of your various phone numbers (cell,home,work,work cell,etc.) through a single phone number. That’s really the tip of the iceberg though.
Long story short I was signed up for a beta invite way back in the Grand Central days and that carried into Google Voice. So you can imagine my joy when I got in a few weeks back. I absolutely love it so far and from the sounds of it invites are going out fairly quickly nowadays (less then 1 week). So if this sounds like something you’d be interested in I highly suggest giving it a try, it’s free so there’s nothing to lose really. You can sign up here -> Google Voice
At it’s heart it’s best to think of Google Voice as a call routing service, you get your new phone number that you picked out and that number routes calls to all of your phones. The cool part about this is your phone number never has to change again you can just give out your Google Voice number and you can switch cell phone providers without transferring your cell number, change land lines, change work phones and you never need to give out a new number again.
Getting Setup
Ok here’s a little Google Voice overview. There’s sooooo much you can do with it, but I’ll just kind of go over some of the major stuff that I think most everyone would find useful. I’m not sure if you set anything up yet so I’ll just start from the beginning….
First things first, you’ve got your invite now you’ll need to pick out a phone number. You’ll be prompted to choose for a list of phone numbers in your area code, pick whatever you want.
Next up you’ll want to add in all of your various phone numbers. You can do this by clicking on ‘settings’ on the top right of the Google Voice screen once you’re logged in. You’ll be prompted to enter in the phone number and what type of phone it is. The reason they need to know the type is to determine if the phone is capable of receiving text messages. You’ll want to give that phone a name, I’d suggest something fairly intuitive to help you identify it, for example ‘work desk phone’ or ‘home cell hpone’. There will be a quick confirmation process where Google will call or text your phone and you’ll need to respond with a randomly generated number. This is just to make sure these phones are actually yours before calls start getting routed to them.
Now that you have your first phone entered in there’s some really cool stuff you can do in terms of how it behaves. You can click on edit and then advanced to see some of these options. You can choose whether or not you want to phone to be rung on the weekends or during the week or at specific times during the week or weekends. Here’s an example of how I use it. My work desk phone is set to ‘never ring on the weekend’ and on weekdays it’s set not to ring between the hours of 5pm and 8am. Thus the phone only will ring at times I might actually be at my desk. My personal cell phone on the other hand is set to accept calls all the time.
So using the same process as above add as many phones as you want to your account. You can always stop calls from being forwarded to a particular phone by simply unchecking a box. Say for instance you going to be out of town and you’re only going to have a particular phone on you. You can disable all of your other phones temporarily.
Call Screening
One cool feature is the ability to screen your calls, if a phone number is unknown or is not present in your gmail contacts the caller will be prompted to say their name, if they’re in your gmail contacts it automatically dictates their name when you receive a call from them. Google voice then tells you the name of the caller and gives you the option to pickup the call or to let it go to voicemail.
Free Outgoing Texts
Standard charges still apply when recieving text messages on your phone, but you can now send text messages for free from any computer with internet access via Google Voice. Just click on sms, put in the phone number or if they’re in your gmail contacts you can just search by name,then just enter your message and hit send.
Uber Voicemail & Call Recording
Voicemail messages are automatically saved as MP3s files and transcribed into text. You can then read/listen to the messages directly from the google voice site. You can be notified when new messages arrive via and email or a sms message. You can also choose to record a conversation by just hitting #4 on your dialpad during a call. I could see the recording feature being incredibly handy during conference calls and things of that nature. One word of caution for all of the drunk dialers out there this feature could prove to make your actions exponentially more regrettable:)
Groups
Pretty simple, you can create custom groups from your gmail contacts and when members of those groups call you, you can configure it to only ring on certain phones and assign custom voicemail messages for member of said group.
Widgets
This is by far one of my favorite features, you can create custom widgets that you can embed into websites that will allow people to call you. Thus you can provide a public way for people to call you without actually having to give out your number.
You can also create a custom voicemail message for people calling you via the widget and you can dictate which phones it will ring if at all (straight to voicemail). What I really love about this as you can see from the example above I have a google voice widget on my “Marty’s Garage” site. I’m using it as a way to allow interactive feedback for the podcast. The widget simply goes straight to a custom voicemail and since messages are stored as MP3s I’ll be able to easily edit them into future episodes.
Smartphone Apps
So here’s kind of the icing on the cake, all this stuff sounds pretty sweet right? There’s still that problem of getting everyone switched over to your new number. All of the cool voicemail tricks and stuff won’t really do you any good if everyone still calls your old number. So you’re gonna look kind of weird when you tell everyone you have this new phone number and then you call them from your old phone number. You might as well prepare a script that explains the whole google voice thing, but alas there is a solution…. if you have an android or blackberry smartphone.
Google has released apps on those 2 platforms that allow you to make calls from your phone and to the people your calling it appears that they’re receiving a call from your GV number, problem solved. Plus you can access your voicemail and change your GV settings, etc. through this same app.
Why no iPhone app? Well quite simply Apple and/or AT&T are acting like a bunch of lame asses IMO. Google has released the app to them but for some odd reason they’re blocking it from the app store. You can read more about it over at businessweek.