Update On My GoogleVoice Voicemail Experiment

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.