Google Voice

So I came across Google Voice a while back and submitted my request to sign up. It took a couple weeks but today I received my new Google Voice phone number and so far, it pretty much rocks.

First of all, you get to choose your area code and then you get to search for a number you want. You can even punch in keywords to search for. After a number of different tries, I settled on a phone number that includes “Mat”.

Why google voice? Let me tell you all about it.

Let’s say you have a business phone(s) and a personal phone(s) – you don’t want to be getting business calls on one and personal calls on the other. Now you just give out one phone # to EVERYONE. You can set up GV to route all your business calls to your office phone. You can set it to route all your personal calls to your home phone. You can even set it to have calls from your family ring both you and your wife’s cell phones. The combinations are limitless.

Beyond that, if you don’t pick up the call, it will go to your Google Voicemail. You can customize the greetings that different callers receive. For instance your business calls will get your business voice mail message while friends will get your personal voice mail message. Again, the combinations are limitless.

You can mark certain callers to ALWAYS go to voice mail (they will hear a phone ringing but your actual phone won’t ring). You can also mark certain callers as "Spam" so that they can never get through to you and all their messages are deleted just like spam e-mail.

If you miss a call, you can dial in to GV to hear the person’s voice message as they are leaving it.

All voice mails are converted to e-mail and sent to your e-mail box where you can read a transcript or punch a button and hear the message on your computer. Of course you can dial in to get your messages like any other phone. This means you can also forward voice mails via e-mail.

Have a business website? You can import a call widget so that prospective customers can just click your webpage and call you (your phone # remains protected until you choose to provide the client with it).

So there it is – since I haven’t given anyone my # yet, I haven’t really got it running full blast but I did leave myself a voice mail to check it out. Works pretty good I think.

Oh, and the cost? ABSOLUTELY FREE!

Google Voice, man - I am pretty sure it is awesome.

UPDATE: That voice mail I left for myself? The transcript was automatically send to my phone as a text message. That's way cool.

UPDATE - DAY 2: So checking voice mails in an issue for me. When life gets busy, I have been known to go weeks without checking it. Anyone that really knows me is going to e-mail me anyway. With GV, all my vm are right there in my e-mail box so I am constantly checking my vm by default - and that's probably a good thing as well . . .