I have a Google Voice phone number now. I set it up like it’s a home phone, with a local phone number. I don’t have a ‘real’ phone, but that’s not a problem as it will ring both my wife and my cell phones.
I have been handing it out to friends and such, and updating my contact info with various companies.
I haven’t gotten many phone calls with it. In fact, I had to bug a buddy this morning to call it a few times so I could play with some of the features.
The neatest feature, of course, is the calling of the new ‘house’ phone number, and both of our cell phones ringing. If one of us answers, and it’s for the other person, hitting the * key causes the other phone to ring again. This conferences in the other person. How cool is that?
The voicemail is pretty sweet too. It records the voicemail and saves it to my Google Voice Inbox – kinda like email. It transcribes – speech to text – the message and will email the recorded message and the text of the message to me. The coolest part is it texts (SMS) the text of the voicemail to our cellphones.
I can also embed a voicemail into my blog. Here is my friends message to me.
The transcription is pretty good. Good enough I can get the gist of the message without listening to it. Here is what it heard.
all your very here listen to a live right now because you’re just being weird with a strange little person you are so this is your first voicemail bye
Another cool feature is the ‘record conversation’ feature. Now, every time that a company calls me and tells me that they may be recording the message, I will record it too. Their recordings are for customer service training, mine are for my own personal amusement – like blogging them.
Another cool feature, is that you can text my new phone number like it’s a cell phone, and the text gets forwarded on to both cell phone numbers.
It has a lot more new features that I haven’t had a chance to play with yet.
Contact me if you want the new phone number. I still have my cell phone number. I my old Florida ‘home’ phone numbers go, so if you still have those, get ahold of me, and I will get this phone number mess straightened out for you.
