Google recently released invites for their Google Voice service, an outcome of their purchase of GrandCentral back in 2007. Although I missed the GrandCentral…train.., I did receive my new gvoice invite last week and have been slowly easing into using the service.
The main offering of the service appears to be call forwarding: you get a new phone number from the service, and then can set up rules as to where it should ring, and when. For example, calls during the day may be routed to a cell, whereas evening calls ring through to a home line. This can also encourage people to be more willing to share their number publicly, as it is masking their actual number.
I only have a cell phone, so forwarding calls isn’t really the big draw for me. But there were two main features that peaked my interest about the service:
- sending SMS messages from the computer
- personalized voicemail messages
From the Google Voice website, you can send SMS messages to anyone in your contacts list, and see the threaded response right on screen. No more surreptitiously tapping on your phone while at your desk! The threaded messages features is also great.
If you use a single phone number for your different social and professional groups, you may want to leave different voicemail greetings for them. I am planning to attend a conference in a few weeks, and anticipate leaving my schedule on my voicemail for certain approved callers, so facilitate our meeting up. The rest of the world will have no idea what sessions I’m attending (at least not via my voicemail).
As I dug into the service a bit more, I found many more great features to enjoy.
There is a very robust use of groups in the gvoice product.I can assign users to groups, and settings can be applied globally, to groups, or individual callers. I already mentioned an application of personal greetings for groups. In addition to this, or routing calls to different places, there is another interesting feature: call presentation.
If call presentation is on, you are presented with several options when someone calls. You can
- answer the call
- send it to voicemail
- send it to voicemail, but “Listen In”
- answer the call, and record the conversation. Note for this last option, both callers hear the system state that the call is being recorded.
With the iPhone’s visual voicemail, I get a list of who has called and can navigate from one message to another to listen in. Well gvoice takes it one step further, by transcribing the voicemail and emailing it to me. I can also embed a recording of the voicemail on a webpage, or email it to someone else. The transcriptions aren’t perfect, but they’re good enough to get a sense of whether the message is worth listening to or not.
Because the service is still so new, there are a few bugs yet to be worked out. Namely, I can’t call my gvoice number from my work phone. Yet I can call the gvoice number of a friend whose number starts with a different area code. There is some speculation as to what the problem is, but it hasn’t yet been confirmed (or fixed). Still, I’m content with the service enough to try to transition over to it.
There are some user experience hiccups so far, namely around the surfacing of the caller’s original number, but I have found a solution that seems to be working well so far, in the form of an iPhone app. I’ll discuss it in another blog post later this week.
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