Google Voice

I finally received approval for Google Voice (GV) today (first request was about 4 weeks ago). In a nutshell, Google Voice provides the user with a couple of options –

• Use their own phone number with several custom options
  
• Use a Google phone number which can ring other phones (eg, home, office, mobile)

I chose the latter option. I have a Google phone number which can ring other personal phones. There are several custom options including alternative answering phone messages and selection of phones to ring. The product is still in the testing mode. As an example, GV was initially unable to successfully ring my home phone number the first couple of times that I tried.  It did work with my office phone!

When a person leaves voice mail, you receive an "interpreted" copy of the audio as a text file.  This is where you have to have a sense of humor and perhaps a little imagination!!  The voice to text is not perfect.  If you miss a phone call, the message is sent to your phone voice mail and a text interpretation of the audio is located in your google voice web site.

One of the upsides is that GV displays all call information from a web page which looks similar to gmail (inbox, history, spam, trash, etc) – see figure below.

According to the web – Microsoft will be offering a comparative product, Bing Ring, in January 2010 (http://www.bbspot.com/News/2009/12/microsoft-bing-ring.html ).