Google Voice – Drahusz

Image via CrunchBase

About a year ago I signed up for Google Voice. At first I was a little skeptical about how well this would work. Do I really need another number for people to call me on, and what can I do with it. Well, I’ve used my Google Voice number as a primary contact number for people to reach me instead of my cell phone.

The client I currently work for has a shielded building. You can not receive a cell phone signal no matter how close you are to the windows. But what if I daycare needs to call me because of an emergency. Sure I can give them my office number, but I work at two different sites. They aren’t going to know where I am today. That’s where Google Voice comes in. I can give them one number and it will ring multiple phones at different times of the day.

Now Google Voice is connected to my Gmail account. When I access my Gmail account in Google Chrome, I can use my headset and call from my PC to any landline number in the United States and Canada for free. I can use the Google Voice mail system to store the messages, and enable all kinds of features.

One feature that I don’t think works all that well is voice mail transcription. I dumped that feature back in October 2009 after several failures. The transcriptions didn’t come close top what the message was. I might look into it again.

I’ve not tried the Google Voice extension / plug-in with Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Opera on my Windows 7 PC or my Ubuntu Linux notebook at home. I’ll try it out this weekend to see how well the video chat works compared to Skype. Maybe I’ll switch over to Google Voice for everything and use Skype as a backup.

Got my Google Voice

Last week at work, a colleague at work was talking about a Google app he just configured called Google Voice. Google Voice reminds me of a service I use to sell at Bell Atlantic Mobile called Contact Line (which gave you a 800 number for people to call and that call would be routed to your pager, cell, office, or home phone); but Google Voice is more advanced with the web interface, e-mail and SMS notifications.

First you need to sign up for Google Voice. I had to wait about four days to receive the e-mail which invites you to setup the service. I got to choose my new phone number from a list in my area code (you can use your zip code too). So far here is what I like about Google Voice:

First I can give that number out to anyone without having to give them my personal cell, home, or work phone numbers
If I change jobs or move to a office, I can configure Google Voice to go to the new phone number without having to notify everyone of the change
I can configure any phone not to receive calls during hours when I know I am not there: example would be no need to ring the home phone when I am at work
I can have Google Voice transcribe the voice message into text and send me an e-mail to one or multiple e-mail addresses when a voice message arrives (see comments below)
I can have contacts in different groups to enable different features (Friends, Family, Coworkers)
Allow Caller ID to be passed through to my phone instead of of my Google Voice number

The one option that I don’t think works too well is transcribing the voice message into an e-mail. I left several test messages and many words are wrong. Plus I receive 2 SMS messages to my cell phone with each new voice message. The first message states I have a new message then a second message follows with the poorly transcribed message. To resolve that just disable Transcribe from the Settings screen.

I also decided to have the Caller ID send me the Google Voice number instead of the number of the person calling me. I might change that back after seeing how well these settings I picked worked.