A few weeks ago, I ported my mobile phone voicemail to GoogleVoice. After a few hiccups getting started, I am now comfortably settled in to using this as my only source for voicemail.
What I like about it:
1. I love that regardless of what number I give out ( and I am now only giving out my GV number as the way to contact me ), all of my voicemail winds up in the same place. I no longer am having to hunt down messages in ( at least ) two places.
2. I no longer have any space constraints for my voicemail inbox. It’s absurd that phone companies are still limiting voicemail space, and I can now archive all of my voicemails without worrying about whether my mailbox will fill up.
What is less than ideal:
1. As many have talked about, the speech to text translation rarely gets close to the actual message. I generally have to play the message, even though I get the text via email.
2. If you are in a remote spot, with little to no web access for your phone, #1 becomes a much larger issue. Because you can’t play the message from your phone, but have to be on the Internet to play it, there have been times when I have not been able to listen to messages right away.
This second item has been rare, mainly because I am not in remote spots very often.
Overall, I have not missed visual voicemail on my iPhone, and intend to keep on using GV as my voicemail destination.
This morning I was doing some testing on an application I am building for work, and wanted to set up my Twitter account to forward my SMS messages to my Google Voice account. The setup for Twitter’s mobile integration requires that you send a text message to Twitter’s short code to get things rolling.
I went to Google Voice and promptly sent the required message to Twitter. Sadly, I immediately received an error back. After doing some poking around, it appears that Google Voice does NOT support short codes for SMS, or at the very least they support very few of them ( depending on who you read ).
Has anyone out there found a way around this? This seems like a major hole in the functionality of Google Voice’s SMS feature. If I want to have “One Number For Life” as was the promise of Grand Central back in the day, I need to be able to do it all with that number.
Post a comment here if you have found a way around this, or I am missing something. Here is a link to the thread I found on the Voice support forum.
I have really been getting a lot of use out of Google Voice since I last posted about moving your mobile voice mail to Google Voice.
I have started moving all of my voice traffic onto this number, and most importantly, have found a hot new desktop application that makes it so simple to dial from your Mac desktop. Voice Mac is a must-have if you are using GV. It allows you to both dial out and send / receive SMS ( text ) messages from your GV number. The SMS chat window is especially nice for viewing text message conversations right from your desktop without having to use your phone at all.
I am not sure if there is a Windows equivalent out there. I did not really look all that hard, but could not find one in my cursory search.
One odd thing I have found is that when I use GV, it seems to be taking a long time to disconnect the call from my home phone. It seems that the “hang up” message is being delayed for some reason.
I would really like to have the ability to add another number to my account at some point, but for now what I have is working just fine.
Google released a new feature for Google Voice wherein you can now forward your mobile phone voicemail to Google Voice. Google Voice is a service that allows you to have a phone number “in the cloud” ( to use an over-hyped buzzword ) that you can then control all of your inbound and outbound call activities through one interface.
This new feature allows you to have your mobile voicemail be stored at / with Google Voice instead of with your mobile provider. The advantages ( if it works well ) are that you have central voice mail for all of your phone numbers, and get all of the voicemail features of Google Voice ( transcription, email alerts, etc. )
The process took all of about three minutes to complete, and is supported for most of the major carriers in the US. You just go into the ‘Settings’ section for your Google Voice account and choose to ‘Activate Google Voice voicemail for this number’. Once you select it, you will be prompted to enter the number sequence to forward your voicemail. You get immediate confirmation.
I intend to test it for the next few days and see how it works.
Update:
GV users…calls to your cell can either ring other phones or go straight to VM. Go to “Edit” a phone, hit “Advanced Settings”, and choose ‘Go Straight to Voice Mail’
