Website Wednesday: Google Voice

Google Voice is the newest among dozens of free web-based services that Google offers. It's so exclusive at this time that very few people have it yet - except me.

At it's core Google Voice gives you a free phone number that will automatically ring and transfer to any one of several different phones you have. For instance, if you have a home phone number, a mobile phone number, and a work phone number, you can give people your Google Voice phone number instead and it will automatically ring all three of your phones. Then Google will instantly transfer the call to which ever of your phones you pick up first. Here's a brief video overview:



That's pretty convenient if you want to make yourself easily available no matter where you are, but what if you're like me and have only one phone number anyway? Why am I recommending Google Voice and why should you care about and it?

1) Get a cool vanity phone number:
Google Voice lets you choose your own phone number. No matter where you live you can choose which area code you want to use. Then choose from what seems like hundreds of available numbers within that area code. But it gets better. Remember 1-800-MATTRES (leave off the last S for Savings) in the late 1980s or 1-800-COLLECT from the early 1990s? Of course you do. They were just one thousands of business that knew how much easier it is to remember a word rather than a long series of random digits. So just like them, you can have your own customized vanity phone number (still free). With Google Voice you can search for available numbers - even by letters. I searched for the word "MIKE" within the 704 area code and one was available so I took it. Now I can tell people that my phone number is 704-###-MIKE and they'll easily be able to remember it! Or instead, maybe you can get a vanity phone number related to your business or your personality or almost anything else you can think of.

2) Stop (some) unwanted calls:
Have you ever had to give your phone number to a business for some reason and ended up getting unwanted marketing calls from them? With Google Voice you can actually block numbers from ever ringing your phone(s). It's just like a spam filter for your phone. Next time I drop my car off for maintenance I'll give them my Google Voice number. If by chance they later end up calling me about buying a new car I'll just block them.

3) Lots of other cool features including free outgoing text messages, voice mails transcribed to text, optionally recording your conversations, and conference calling.

4) What do you have to lose? It's free!

The only caveat at this time is that you can't actually sign up for the service yet, but I'm telling you about it so you can get on the waiting list now. Request an invitation now and as soon as you can join they'll send you an email. Click here to request an invitation to use Google Voice!

So how did I get access to Google Voice before almost anybody else? I signed up to be a beta tester of Grand Central long before Google bought the company and changed the name to Google Voice. Within minutes of Google announcing that they were slowly opening up Google Voice to the public, I received my invitation email. It was thought that anybody who wanted to join would be able to do so by the end of the week but Google is rolling this service out extremely slowly. It's now more than a month after their "public launch" and they're still not sending out invitations to people who weren't already on their waiting list to be a beta tester. The early adopters get the cool toys.

Labels: Website_Wednesday