Google Voice

Yesterday I signed up for Google Voice, a slick new, free service from Google that I haven't yet figured out exactly how I'm going to use.

Google Voice gives you a phone number (and you get some choice in what that number is, such as choosing the area code and sometimes even specific numbers or letters) that becomes your universal phone number. You register other phone numbers with Google Voice, and when some one calls this new phone number it rings all of your registered numbers.

For instance, let's imagine that you were given the new number 555-2009. You then register your cell phone, your work phone, and your home phone. When someone calls 555-2009, ALL THREE PHONES RING SIMULTANEOUSLY. The first phone that picks up gets connected.

That's pretty cool all by itself, but there are other nifty features as well. If no one answers at any of the numbers, the caller can leave a voicemail. If he/she does that, Google translates that voicemail into text and will send a text message of that voice mail to your cell phone. You can also go online to the Google Voice website and either read or listen to the voicemail.

There are other features as well that I haven't really had the time to try out, but I'm immediately struck by a few possibilities for how this could be used:

1. For professional reasons. I COULD set up my work, business, and cell phones with a single number and give that number only to people I felt needed to reach me in the event of an emergency. That way I could get the call from those important people wherever I am. My problem with this is twofold: 1) At night my work has night service which picks up after the second ring. I'm pretty sure that most calls would go straight to this night service, which isn't going to work for me. 2) Lisa currently doesn't work during the day, which means that the phone would be ringing at home with business calls and she might answer them instead of me. So for right now, I don't think I'll be using it in this fashion.

2. For personal use. I COULD set up Lisa's cell phone and home phone with a single number. That way when people call that number both her home cell and home phone will ring, and she can choose to answer the home phone instead of the cell phone, thus saving her cell minutes for when she's away from the house.

3. So People Think I'm Always Home. If I'm going on vacation and going to stay with someone, I could (with their permission) add their home phone to my Google Voice account temporarily. That way when people call my house the new phone will ring and I can pick it up and answer as if I were at home. This would be especially useful in an area with spotty cell phone access (like the entire state of Mississippi USED to have).

Anyway, it's all pretty cool, and I'm sure I'll have more ideas when I've actually had time to play with it (I've spent more time writing about it for this post than I did testing it). If you're interested, the web site is http://www.google.com/voice . I think you currently have to be invited to sign up, but I'm nobody special and I got invited, so I'm pretty sure that if you sign up you'll receive an invitation in a day or so.