Charles E Smith

Google Voice is currently a beta service offered by the big G to help mitigate some annoyances with phones. Ever get stuck listening to a voicemail that’s five minutes long and essentially just says “call me back”? Or pick up a call at the office, only to realize that the call is going to keep you anchored to your desk for the next 20 minutes? Does your business card have a half dozen numbers to reach you at? Google voice might be for you.

In a nutshell, Google Voice is a currently invite only, free service that allows you to have one number for all your phones, and rings all of your phones when someone calls that number, allowing you to choose which phone you answer. But it doesn’t stop there. You can also transfer calls between phones, screen calls, and get voicemails transcribed and emailed to you along with an audio recording. A bunch more as well, which will be covered below.

First thing is first, go grab an invite. It’s free, so if this sounds interesting at all to you, drop off your email. When you do get invited, you’ll get to choose a number that will become the one number you give to everyone. You can select a number in your area code, zip code, or wherever you’d like. You can also search for text, so you could try to grab 555-5CALLME if you chose to.

Your Inbox. Works like gMail (even with keyboard shortcuts!). SMS and voicemail will show up here.

Setting up the Service

From there, you can set up all of your phones. The process is painless, and pretty customizable. Once you set up your phones, you can choose which phones will ring when you get a call, and which phones will receive SMS. You can set up schedules as well, just in case you don’t want to get calls on your mobile between 9PM and 7AM, or your home phone during office hours, or whatever arbitrary schedule you’d like.

Next, set up your voicemail. The cool thing here is that you can set up multiple greetings for your contacts. When the kids call, they can get “Daddy’s busy, but I’ll call you back soon, sweetie.” while the office gets “I’m not in the office. If this isn’t an emergency, your call will be returned during business hours.” You can set up quite a few of these, which is kind of nice.

Groups and their settings.

You’ll also want to set up your Google Contacts if you aren’t already using this service. I just set up Google Contact Sync (which is built into Address Book on Leopard) using this handy tutorial. A quick search revealed that there are plenty of other ways to get your contacts to Google, and if nothing else most PIM’s support exporting via comma separated values (.CSV) so you should be able to get all your important numbers into Google without too much trouble. When you set up your contacts, make sure that you use the “Groups” feature, as this is how gVoice decides which voicemail greeting to give, and whether or not the call is going to get screened (depending on how you chose in “Settings”).

Another tip I found is that you want to change any voicemail boxes or answering machines to answer only after 20 rings (or some other long number) so that your old answerer doesn’t pick up your call before Google does.

Phone Settings.

Using the Service

Once you’ve got all of the basics set up, start giving everyone your Google number. I did this with a mass email and a giant SMS. I imagine that I’ll probably get a few stragglers later on, but this took care of most people. Now, when someone calls or SMS’s, Google will send the call/SMS for whichever phones you set up. Another bonus: As long as you use Voice, you’ll never need another number. You can easily change and add phones at your whim.

When you answer a call through Voice, you’ll be presented with options: 1. Accept the call. 2. Send to voicemail. 3. Send to voicemail and listen in. 4. Record the call. This can be kind of annoying. I use an iPhone, so for contacts that I don’t screen ever (like family) I turned this option off. You can also have people that aren’t in your contacts list record their name, which gets played back to you before you choose what to do with the call.

If a voicemail or SMS is sent to your Voice number, it shows up in your online inbox. You can reply to SMS, listen to your voicemail, or view the transcription online. You can also have Voice send you SMS or email of the transcriptions.

I’m sure you’re wondering how well transcription works, and the answer is about 50/50. It’s pretty decent for getting the gist of the message, but not too great altogether. If you have someone that mumbles a bit, you’ll probably still need to listen to the voicemail.

Calling out, as well as SMS can be a bit tricky. When you call out, you want your Google number to appear in the voicemail. On a landline or dumb phone, you have to call your Voice number, then enter the number of your contacts. You can also call from the web interface. This will cause Voice to ring your phones, and when you answer it will connect connect you to the contact you selected.

On a smartphone, it gets a bit easier, particularly on Android and Blackberry, which Google has built apps for. On iPhone, there isn’t an app quite yet, so you have a choice between VoiceCentral or GVMobile. This makes it easier to get calls to people with your voice number. There’s another small trick, and that’s to use the 406 number you get from Google with an SMS.

When someone sends you an SMS, it doesn’t come from their number, it comes from a 406 number. This number is unique to you, but it allows you to reply and have your Google number show. You can also use this number to make calls to them with your Google number as well. I’ve simply been programming this as a secondary number with the tag “GVoice” and then using it instead of their regular number. There’s a lot more interesting stuff going on with this 406 number, but that’s a different article.

All in all, making calls is a bit kludgy without that 406 number, which you don’t get without receiving an SMS from the person you want to call, and is different depending on which phone you are calling from. You can use the web interface, but that’s not quite as easy as just hitting the speed dial on your phone. Hopefully with the release of more official apps for mobile devices this will improve.

Verdict

A little inconvenient to set up, but once you get it rolling it’s immensely useful. I rarely have to listen to voicemails now (which I love) and the ability to have one single number to give out is almost enough a reason to switch on its own. When Google gets around to releasing an official iPhone app, I am sure I’ll be happeir with it. In any case, I’m no longer giving out anything but my Google number.