Google Voice Review

 
It's no secret that Google is not just a search engine anymore.  Yep, Google has its hands in just about every facet of the Internet. An often overlooked and certainly underrated Google product is Google Voice.  What is Google Voice and how can it help me?  The best high-level summary of Google Voice is actually a well done overview video by none-other than Google:

Does Google Voice live up to the hype?

I've been a Google Voice user for a little over a year now and I can honestly say that it has absolutely changed the way I deal with both mobile calling and landline calling.

What seems like just another number to manage is actually something that helps you manage your phone life like never before. While there are several uses for Google Voice, I am going to outline the way I have chosen to implement Google Voice.

Using Google Voice to save money

My primary reason to use Google Voice was to save money on my monthly cell phone bill. By implementing Google Voice, my monthly usage went down from an average of 1400 minutes a month to around 500 minutes. I was able to change my plan from an expensive unlimited minutes plan to a much cheaper monthly package. I realized that many of the minutes I used were while I was sitting at my desk in front of my computer. In my case, I configured Google Voice to ring my Skype In phone number while at my desk, but it would be just as easy to have it ring a land-line (e.g. office line). The basic value proposition of Google Voice is simple: It can ring any phone that you want or ring all of them simultaneously.

Another potential money saving feature is that the service boasts unlimited free text messaging, both sending and receiving.  A side benefit is the ease of use factor as it's much easier and faster sending text messages from a computer keyboard rather than a mobile phone's keyboard.

One Caveat

If call routing is what you want (and believe me, you want this), than the hardest thing about implementing Google Voice is that you really have to commit to using your new Google Voice number as your only number. For many, this is too great a barrier to entry, despite the service being free. There is a certain freedom though, from only managing a single number to give out.

Beyond saving money

Dynamic call routing, saving money, and managing a single number is all well and good, but these are not the only compelling attributes of Google Voice. The other goodies that Google Voice has up its sleeve:

• Transcribed Voicemail - Yes it works and in my experience is about 70% accurate.  Every voicemail received is transcribed automagically to text that you can read instead of having to listen to the voicemail.  This is much more valuable than you might think.


• Do Not Disturb  (DND) - If I am in a meeting, I can set Google Voice to route all calls directly to voicemail and I can even set an amount of time to automatically set DND off.


• Unique outgoing messages - More of a fun feature, you can record messages for specific people so when they get your voicemail, they are greeted with a unique message.


• Call Recording - You can easily record calls for future reference.

What's the catch?

Besides having to send out your number to everyone on your contact list, the only flaw that I have observed is the rare but occasional service outage.  This has only happened twice since I've been using the service, but when the service is down, people are unable to reach you with your Google Voice number.  The outages have only lasted an hour or two, but they were outages none-the-less.

Overall, I highly recommend the service and it's hard to beat the price which is absolutely free.

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Google Voice

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