Post by David Pierce. Find me on Twitter.
Okay, I’ll admit I’m a bit prone to getting overly excited about cool new Web apps. I may or may not have spent the better part of 6 hours searching through, trying, and evaluating every imaginable blogging application for Mac before finally choosing one (I picked Blogo, but that’s another post).
Rarely, if ever, have I been so excited about an application as I was about Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral), the new service from Google that I’m fairly convinced is going to have huge effects on how we use our phone. Trouble is, GV has long been under a private beta, and only recently opened it to more users (though still not to everyone, sadly).
About 10 days ago, I finally got the invite. I furiously signed up, picked my number, and got going.
As I played with the software, I found ten reasons that everyone’s going to love Google Voice, and one huge, mammoth-sized drawback (for now).
It Rings All Your Phones
Do you have a work phone, a home phone, a cell phone, a Blackberry, and some other crazy telephonic device I’ve never heard of? Google Voice will ring them all (or whichever ones you want), and you can answer from whichever one you want. No more “I’m at the office for ten minutes, then home for an hour, then try my cell…” Just GV.
It Records Your Calls
One click of a button, and your call is recorded. Awesome for everything from interviews to making sure you get the phone number your friend is about to read to you. Everything gets stored in the GV system, and is easily accessible online.
It Sends Free SMS
Text messages sent to your GV number go to two places – any phone you choose, and the GV interface. You can respond from within Google Voice, or send them from your cell phone. Texting, at least for me, is more and more prevalent in day-to-day life, and GV makes sure you’ve got them covered. And for free, if you’re sending from GV.
It Runs on a Schedule
Want to be rung on your cell phone in the morning, office phone in the afternoon, and not at all after 11pm? Done.
It Transcribes Your Voicemail
When someone leaves you a voicemail, it’s both recorded and transcribed. You’re sent a notice, either by email or text, letting you know you have a voicemail, and including the transcription. The transcription isn’t perfect, but it’s darn good – good enough to know what’s going on. If it’s not, just click a button, and listen away. No entering passcodes, and pressing 1, and then 3, and then 7. Just read or listen, and act.
It Lets You Play Favorites
Every setting in GV can be specific to one person, a few people, or whatever you can come up with. Group your contacts and sort them by ringtone, or whether they can even reach your phone (it’s easy to send someone straight to voicemail). If you only want your friends calling you at night, GV can do that.
It Keeps Your Privacy
Having a Google Voice number means you’ve got a new measure of privacy – your actual cell, work, or home numbers aren’t given out. Worst-case scenario, you can always change or delete your GV number, and be rid of the issues. Also, GV lets you embed widgets on websites saying “Call Me” to let people call your GV number, without ever revealing your number. Your personal information, and even your number, is protected well by Google.
It Consolidates Everything
All your voicemails, texts, and call logs, all in one place. If you’re anything like me, that’s absolutely a dream come true.
It Lets You Unplug
With one click, the “Do Not Disturb” feature turns on in Google Voice, and it will leave you alone until you come back. People can still call, text, and leave messages, and it’ll all be waiting in GV when you get back. If you need to get away, Google Voice lets you do it better than just about anything else, while still collecting all the data you wouldn’t want to miss forever.
It Moves Your Calls
How many times have you been on a call, only to notice your battery’s dying? If you’re me, the answer is approximately 821,576,342 (yeah, I counted). If you’re on a Google Voice call, one button pressed, and all the other phones associated with your account start to ring; simply answer one of them (ideally one with a better battery) and keep on talking.
There is, as I see it, only one major problem with Google Voice:
Goofy numbers-handling
If you call my Google Voice number, and I call you back from my cell phone, the number you’ll see when I call isn’t the GV number, but my actual cell number. That’s a problem, and will do a lot to prevent people from fully switching over to Google Voice. Google is fixing that (they’ve already done it with Blackberry and Android), and are promising that you’ll soon be able to port your existing number into Google, thus avoiding any changing hassle at all, but for now, it’s a pain.
So, if you’re on the fence about Google Voice, get off the fence and onto the invites list. It’s US only right now, unfortunately, but hopefully that’ll change. And if you get the chance to become a GV user, I’m betting you’ll be as converted as I am.
Photo: Carlo Nicora
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Call you GV number, press 2 to call out. No address book so it's as advanced as a rotary phone there, but the outgoing number will be your GV #. Be nice if they used their transcription technology so you could Speak your target's name and they'd connect you…
Good point – it IS possible, just super-cumbersome. I want to type the ten numbers (or just click on my contact) and have it call. GV makes you work too hard at this point to make calls out. But it looks like that's changing!
Considering you're raison d’être is “to bridge the gap between the early-adopters, who speak their own language and use every possible online tool, and everybody else” you are in this case speaking your own language.
GV requires a proactive involvement from the user to configure and operate. Most of us want to buy a cell phone, switch it on and hope it works. GV's raison d’être is to unify all your numbers into one, the features you cover are not life changing or unique and as an everyone else would rarely care about.
My personal view is that GV is teetering on the fallacy of misplaced solutions – the solution is OK, a friend of mine (geek by his own admission) gave me a hands on demo. GV's biggest drawback you mention (we should note as an almost, by the way) is a hugely significant reason NOT to set yourself up with Google Voice. The last thing I want to do is have to play around to get my cell to ring or call with the correct caller ID. I as one of the “everyone else” would also like to point out that having seperate numbers is as important to me as having a single one.
That's a great point. But it seems to me that there are others who feel like I do – it's terrible having to tell someone “I'll be in the office for an hour, then out to lunch, then home for a bit, then back in the office.” Having a way to keep everything together, to me, seems like a perfect solution for anyone. Why wouldn't “everyone else” care about cool new things? They're useful features, that make something we all do every day, better. Sounds like a win to me.
Am I speaking my own language? If so, where? I'm always wary of assuming knowledge or prior research – I don't ever want to do that!
I'm on the fence about the privacy policy, namely what kind of logs will Google keep of my phone calls and text messages. I understand of course the prevailing logic – if you don't want anything to be recorded, dont say/write it – but that doesn't stop my idiotic friends from throwing around some words on the phone / text that I would rather them not.
what kind of guarantee do I have that somebody at google wouldn't just tap out key words / phrases, and find everyone talking about it – and then once they get a subpoena from the authorities everything's out in the open.
I think I'll just stick with messenger pigeons and smoke signals, for now.
google.com/voice/m if you have a data plan on your phone.
You DEFINITELY hit the nail on the head, and I think you've pointed out the exact reason there's never going to be a mass-exodus to Google Voice. The idea of someone (especially Google, who already has a ton of information about us) having total access to our phone records IS a scary one.
It'll be interesting to see how Google navigates this one – it's a whole other level of privacy issues. Thanks for the insight.
Nothing annoys me more than people raving on about a piece of software or a service that's still U.S. only. It really sucks being British sometimes. Not a lot. Honestly. But sometimes…
I was lucky enough to have a Grandcentral account (which I never used), so I've had Google Voice since its rollout. The only thing I've done with it so far is to make one phone call from my desktop, and I set it up as the listed phone number on my blog contact page. I think for many people, the “find my anywhere” features is great, but for me, I try to separate my work and professional life. My wife just calls my mobile # when I'm not at home, and I'd never want my work number following me.
I have to admit, though, that your post has me thinking about giving out my GV number to family and close friends as a way to always find me. The biggest obstacle is sitting down and setting it up, and then training everyone to start using a new number, after having had my current mobile number for 8 years.
Oh, I forgot one other thing I used it for – I texted my wife some recipe ingredients she needed when she was at the store, from my comptuer. That was MUCH easier than keying them all in on my iPhone.
You can setup a Google Voice call number in your contacts too. I got the info from lifehacker and have used it for most of my contacts:
If you're calling certain contacts all the time and want the calls to go through Google Voice, you could search to see how to insert one- or two-second pauses into a phone number in your phone's address book. Then create an “Other” number for them that consists of your Google Voice number, then a pause, then “2,” then a pause, then that contact's actual phone number, followed by a “#”. That automates the Google Voice dialing, leaving you with just a bit of a wait while it goes through.
http://lifehacker.com/5311254/how-to-ease-your-...
The main drawback for me is Verizon's Mobile to Mobile free calling. I'm on Verizon and the majority of my cell minutes are spent talking to others on Verizon. If I could still take advantage of this with Google Voice, I would gladly switch over. Instead, I'll be using minutes I otherwise wouldn't.
My point which was probably not well articualted, was and is usability. I have seen and played with it and I have found it too complicated as a consumer proposition. There is no doubt they are useful features and I expect the technically savvy will love it. Admitedly its not clear who Google's the target audience is for this product.
I hope Google Voice peeks at your post to see what everyone is saying is GV's biggest drawback– the call through GV number. With their Android and blackberry app, the prob is solved…. but for regular phones, nope, still a problem.
Stephen I believe HulloMail are British and they have a neat voicemail that links to Gmail and Google Contacts.
Your current cell-phone provider has a ton of information about you (name, address, possibly credit card or banking information, even your rough location) and has total access to your phone records, including call logs and voicemail messages. I don't see Google being really any different.
Great article David. I'm just now getting my Google Voice account set up and I love it for all the reasons you've listed here. It sucks that AT&T pulled the GV iPhone app – that would have been awesome in so many ways.
Block your number, or use the GV Mobile apps for iPhone and Blackberry…AWESOME TOOLS
go to google.com/voice/m on your cellular phone… you can use your browser to select a contact, then it calls your phone of choice to initiate the call to your contact. Showing up as your GV number.
I think I'll wait a while and see if it catches on.
The fact that they can transcribe and store all of the voice data is creepy to me, even if it is optional.
I can definitely understand that. I wouldn't recommend it for business and political use, but for me at least, my voicemails are typically so mundane and uninteresting that I don't really care who sees them.
I AM hoping, though, that more is coming in the way of privacy.
TRUE. Can't wait for something (anything) to come for Windows Mobile.
My girlfriend starting using it. (we both have Android phones) and the SMS is pretty bad. Sloooow refresh rate, messages can be quite delayed sometimes.
They have a ways to go before I'm sold on it. Cool features though.
Bah. All the cool things are US only. iTunes movies, Amazon mp3, hulu, google voice, adultswim.com, etc ..
the gv app on my g1 solves 'the one drawback' for me, and adding my google voice number to my 'myfaves' makes all calls to and from google voice free. Since ALL my calls go through GV both incoming and outgoing it makes all my calls minutes free to anywhere in the us or Canada.
The native apps are HUGE, and mean potentially amazing things for GV users. And since there's a BB app too, I bet there's more coming.
Great call on the number trick, too – just did it with my Verizon account, and it's worked great!
I don't think that is GV issue… The speed of the network is the issue. For the Android, it is TMobile. Which in my opinion is the worst cell phone service available. I think two tin cans on a string do better…
Google Voice doesn't use minutes. At least the out going calls on a smart phone don't. It uses your data plan. In coming calls still use your minutes.
Anybody wanna send me an invite to Google Voice.
williams.jordan.m@yahoo.com
Anybody wanna send me an invite to Google Voice.
williams.jordan.m@yahoo.com