Google Voice is Awesome!
I just wanted to let the whole world know how much I love Google’s new service, Google Voice!
I’d like to make an announcement, in full view of the public eye: Google is taking over my life, and I’m totally cool with that.
I just signed up for Google Voice and now Google has opened yet another port directly into my brain.
For those of you who don’t know, Google Voice is Google’s newest service. It seems that the utility was purchased from a company called Grand Central, but I did little-to-no research into that.
Google Voice gives you all kinds of great features to organize your telephone-related life.
You begin by getting a new phone number. This phone number can be searched and customized to be from a particular area, or contain a particular word/letter combination. For instance, my new Google Voice number is: 3303-KEVIN-1.
Google then latches on to your real phone accounts, and you can link it to up to three phones, your home, your business, and your mobile. I only have one phone, but who knows, maybe someday I’ll have a house phone or maybe at least an office phone.
From there, you can organize your contacts into various groups, and forward calls from people in different groups to different sets of phones. You can customize the voicemail greetings received by groups, or by individuals. You can block calls from certain people, you can send certain people straight to voicemail. You can set a do-not-disturb mode. I keep discovering features.
The coolest thing is that Google keeps a log of everything that goes on. You have an archived report of every call, text or voicemail. You can turn on call recording when you get a call, and save it to your Google Voice. Well on our way to a searchable call database.
Voicemails can be recorded and transcripted (though the voice recognition is not perfect) and the transcript can be texted to you, in case you don’t want to have to go through your annoying phone company’s voicemail system (Verizon…)
No faxing yet, but that would be nice. I’m sure there are many many more features to discover. I’ve heard about things like advanced conference calling, etc. There’s a call-me widget you can add to your blog so that people enter their number and it will automatically connect you. Man, life is great in the 21st, ain’t it?
So you probably want to just sign up, right now. Well Google Voice is invite only, so you have to request an invite. I got mine within 24 hours, so maybe it’s the same for everyone.
So please, call me at 3303-KEVIN-1, so I can play with all the cool Google Voice features. Thanks Google, for my newest toy.
I approve.
Kevin this is a service for people who have stalkers.
P.S. you should invent voice texting, it would be like texting, but u select someone, push a button to record and send. that way u can get inflection and tone but if ppl dont want to respond or pick up they don’t have to cuz its like txting but more like sexting.