Benefits of Google Voice
Regular readers know that I’m a big fan of many Google services. I use their email and calendar client almost daily. Now it’s time to add another application to the list: Google Voice. I’m pretty excited about this one. Read on to learn about it’s great features and how I’ll be using it.
Google Voice (GV) Features I’m Excited About
Here are the main reasons that I’m pumped about Google Voice.
- One phone number forever – No matter where I live, what cell phone service I have, what home phone carrier I’ve selected or where I work, I’ll always have the same phone number. Talk about the ultimately portable number! I just incorporate new numbers as they come along and remove old ones as they become obsolete.
- Replacing our home phone – A little while back, I asked the audience if a home phone was worthwhile. There was great discussion and it really helped me weigh the pros and cons. In the end, I decided to get rid of our home phone. But that doesn’t mean I want to hand out my cell number to every company or person that comes along. Google Voice provides me a phone number that I can make public. Then I control where the calls go, be it voicemail, my work phone, completely blocked, or to my cell. The point is, I get to choose.
Other Benefits of Google Voice
- Voicemail: Setup a voicemail box just like any other. No matter what phone rings, the GV voicemail picks up after so many rings. Then, it transcribes the voicemail into text and sends you an email or SMS alert. How cool is that!?
- Free / cheap calls: GV offers free calls in North America and cheap international call (when compared to cellular charges).
- Block / screen calls: Simply add a phone number to the list and never receive a phone call again. Also, you can require callers to provide their name before you accept their call. This is a great feature for telemarketers.
- Personalized voicemail: GV allows you to setup voicemail for specific numbers.
- Caller ID, SMS, conference calls and more
Ways to Improve
I already see a few problem areas with GV. First, cell carriers allow you to make in-network calls without using any minutes. Going through GV means that all calls are considered out-of-network.
Secondly, making phone calls is a bit clumsy. Users can go online and enter the required information, then GV will call their phone and the destination number. Or, users can call a GV access number, then the destination number. I’ve seen a few iPhone apps that may address this problem. Any iPhone users want to chime in?
Signing Up for Google Voice
Google Voice began as Grand Central (GC) and was limited to GC users. Now GV is accepting new users. You still need to request an invite but the process seems to be moving along much faster.
What do you think? Will you be signing up?
Image courtesy of Monica Arellano-Ongpin
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5 Responses to Benefits of Google Voice
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July 20th, 2009 11:36 am
There is a Blackberry and iPhone app for using Google Voice, now. Thought I’d contribute to your review with two points.
Good: Transcribing vmail to email is a nice feature. If I miss a call or send a call to vmail, GV will do a text-to-speech conversion and email the text to me. It isn’t 100% accurate (maybe not even 90%) but it gives me enough to know what the call was about.
Bad: When making GV calls, there’s almost always some lag because you are going through servers to talk. Fortunately it encourages short calls. Unfortunately it is distracting and not very effective for meetings or pleasantries.
-Jon
July 20th, 2009 1:08 pm
This in very interesting. Thanks for sharing the info!
July 20th, 2009 8:10 pm
@Jon, Thanks for the input. I’ll be looking into the iPhone app sometime soon. I’ve tested out the speech-to-text transcribing and you’re right that it’s not always the most accurate. I didn’t know about the lag when making calls. Thanks for the heads up.
July 30th, 2009 1:04 pm
Ethan, I have a g1 and the android app is great. To use sms, I just launch the app and select compose. This means free sms for me, which is actually why I signed up months ago for the service and, so far, has provided the biggest impact.
For calling, the g1 app also lets you select which phone number your outgoing calls use, the options are, always Google #, international use Google #, never use Google #, ask to use for each call. After you set that up, you just place a call like always. It’s quite seamless, and one of the better integrations (in contrast to Google docs…) I believe it also follows the ringtones you’ve set up on the phone, though I’d have to confirm that to be sure.
a few other uses I see (using the online account):
1) no calls from unwanted people – You can set your default to not forward calls and then add all your contacts to a big group, and you can update the options for them all. The big pain about this is you have to initially set the contact settings for each contact to follow the group rules. While, a bit cumbersome, this basically allows you to force any unwanted or unexpected phone calls to VM. It would be nice if this was a universal option so you didn’t have to set all your contact options individually, but if unsolicited calls really bug you, it does provide a workaround for now, hopefully they’ll add it in the future
2) group organization – if you plan group events and want to be able leave a message containing information only for that group, you can record a message set the group setting to get the messages, such as “our event was rained out today, we will be making alternate plans on Monday”.
3) set call times, in the advanced settings, you can set times the phone will or won’t ring, so you could set it up so it won’t ring when you’re asleep. Currently I turn my phone on silent over night, which works, but no one can get a hold of me at night, even if it’s an emergency. Using Google voice, you could then give out your actual numbers as a “in case of emergency” number, so people can call you during those times if it’s an emergency.
Things I see as potential issues:
1) setting lag time – right now, the settings seem to have a lag, for example, I changed a vm message for my husband, but when I called from his phone, it had not changed. it had changed by morning
2) only one account can forward to a number – Google does not let 2 accounts ring to the same phone number. I’m not sure why, I wish they’d explain if it’s a limitation inherent in the system or if they imposed it. Here is what I see this affecting:
2A) forgot my phone – I’d envisioned that if my husband or I forgot our phones, we could forwarded our calls to each other’s phones and not miss them. This won’t work; I’ve tried adding our numbers to each other’s account and I get a message saying the # is already attached to another account
2B) Home phones – we don’t have one, but the magic of a Google # is you can have it ring to different numbers, presumably home and cell, but most home phone #s are used my multiple people, with this limitation, only one person could have calls forwarded to the home phone
3) mobile to mobile benefits are lost – On T-Mobile, it costs minutes since the call is shown coming from a non-T-Mobile #. For now, my husband calls from his Google # but I don’t. The reason is I only have 3 people who text me, so I just let them know I have a different text number. My husband uses texting more often and it becomes complicated trying to explain to everyone why you have 2 numbers. It would be great if Google could add a check box you could mark indicating if you wanted to use the Google # or cell # to call each person, rather than asking each call on the android phones.
That’s just my initial impression, I only got my invitation a week or so ago (the invitations are coming much faster now)
August 7th, 2009 12:27 pm
as a follow-up, my friend did some research and found that my concern #2 (only one account can forward to a number) is only a problem when you set your phone as a mobile. we changed numbers to “work” and “home” and were able to add them to both accounts.
So far, the only advantage I see to setting a phone as a mobile is you can have alerts sent to your phone via sms. With a phone app that alerts you, this isn’t needed, but if you are using a phone without an available app, receiving txt to your phone would be needed for notification of messages.
So, it looks like this would only affect people if they had some instance where they wanted to receive sms notifications AND use the same cell phone for multiple Google voice accounts
just wanted to clarify