Google Voice takes phone to new heights

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January 2, 2010

By Greg Bott / guest columnist The Meridian Star Sat Jan 02, 2010, 11:21 PM CST

Recently I’ve become a Google Voice (GV) user and I love it. GV actually changes the concept of your phone. Instead of you being attached to multiple phone numbers the phone numbers are attached to you. Here’s what I mean. Prior to Google Voice, you would need to have some idea of where I am to complete a call with me. If it’s during a business day, you might try my work number and then my mobile number. If you didn’t reach me at work or on my cell, now you’d have to guess whether you should call my home or the Airphone on my Learjet. With GV, you call one number for me and all my numbers ring, except for my imaginary Learjet phone.

You can also screen calls. If someone not in your address book calls you, you can configure GV to prompt them to record their name so you can decide whether or not to take their call. You can turn this feature off or apply it by contact or by groups of contacts.

You can also specify which phone or phones ring based on who is calling. For example, if a customer calls me, I want my work and cell phone to ring at the same time, while if my daughters call, I want all phones to ring at the same time. If undesirables call, they go straight to voice mail.

GV also enables you to play customized greetings for an individual or groups of callers. You can have one greeting for your clients or work friends, a greeting for your mother, and still another custom greeting for your significant other.

As you would expect, GV provides voice mail and that voice mail is delivered as an attachment to an e-mail. What you might not expect is that GV also transcribes voice mail to text and sends them to your GV web inbox as an e-mail message and as also a text message to your phone. Now you can read your voice mail before you listen to it. The transcription is far from perfect, but you can generally get the idea of what the message is about. The ability to read voice mail like e-mail is extremely valuable and time-saving.

Since you receive voice mail in e-mail, you can store it on your computer or forward it via e-mail. GV also supports conference calls and offers low-cost International dialing.

Aside from all these features, perhaps the feature I like most is using GV on the web to send free text messages via my computer to any text-enabled mobile phone. I own an iPhone and its biggest drawback is the lack of hardware keyboard. As a former BlackBerry user, I loathe texting and e-mailing on the iPhone. It’s so much faster using a real keyboard to text. You’ll love it.

So for voicemail like e-mail, ability to define which phone rings, custom voicemail greetings, voicemail transcription, call screening, international calling, and computer-based text-messaging, consider trying Google Voice when it goes Public Beta.

Bott Technology Solutions helps small to midsize businesses with computer technology needs and may be reached via e-mail at gregbott@bottinc.com or at 601-207-0509.

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