Google Voice Review, one number for all your phones.
Google Voice is a phone service for managing all of your phones (and numbers) under one Google Voice phone number. Give people your Google voice number and you decide which phone rings and when. Recently Google invited me to test Google Voice and my first impressions of the service are pretty good.
One thing you need to know right off the bat is that Google Voice is not a cell phone service and you do not get a physical phone. Google Voice lets you manage multiples phones and numbers with one phone number that you can pick with Google Voice. Google Voice also masks your real phone numbers from caller I.D. This means that I can send and reply to TXT messages on my real cell phone and people won’t get my actual cell phone number, they see my Google Voice number.
I like to use examples so check ‘em out below.
Privacy
Google hides your real phone numbers.
I goto the Google Voice interface and send an SMS TXT message to my friends phone. He then replies and my real phone gets the TXT message but his real phone # doesn’t show up. Instead Google assigns a “fake” number for my friends phone internally to Google. This is done so that I can reply without giving him my real phone number. This “fake” phone number can only be used by my cell phone number and can not be TXTed or dialed from another phone. I then save this “fake” number as my friends phone number in my contact list on my real phone. Anytime I want to call or TXT message him I use that number. Think of it as a proxy server for phones.
Ring Scheduling
You pick which phone rings and when.
There are a ton of options with Google voice, one of which I use everyday is the phone ringer scheduling feature. You can set your various phones up to ring on certain days at certain times.
Here’s an example of what I do. I have three phones setup in my Google Voice. My work phone, my cell phone and my home phone. I schedule my Goolge Voice number to ring my work phone from 7:40am-5pm during the week, my cell phone from 5:15pm – 10pm during the evening and my home phone number all day and night on the weekend. I also make it so if I don’t answer my work phone my cell phone rings. This way I don’t waste minutes on my cell phone while I am at work and at my desk, but I also don’t have to give people my actual direct phone number to work, my cell phone or my home number.
Google Voice Mail
Don’t listen to voice mails, read ‘em.
One of the coolest and more controversial features of Google Voice would be the voice mail features. Google Voice can transcribe your voice mails into actual text and email them to you. I don’t even listen to voice mails anymore, I read them. Here is an example message of a friend that left me a voice mail, “This is Jason, gimme a call when you get a chance on my cell (xxx)xxx-xxxx thanks bye.” Pretty cool. Don’t worry, for your paranoid people you can turn the voice mail transcribing feature off.
Record Phone Calls
Snoop on your own phone calls.
Another scary but cool feature is the ability to record phone calls. I simply type in the phone number I want to call into the Google Voice interface and Google will first call my primary phone, then patch me in to the phone number I am calling. The discussion is then recorded and transcribed. The phone conversation seems a little laggy and it’s really useless unless your joining a conference call where you may need to go back and reference information. You can also play with it for regular use of your the CIA Spy wana-be kind of person. 
To sum things up, with Google Voice you get one phone number to hand out to everyone. You can schedule when you want your real phones to ring. If you need to block someone, you click the “Block” button and it’s a done deal. If you get new real phones you simple add them and remove your old ones and you don’t have to re-hand out your phone number to everyone again.
I think Google Voice is pretty cool. Let me know if you want an invite and when I get some I’ll send you one.
DIGG ME
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Leave a comment