So I thought by now there would be a flood of blog posts on the Interwebz by those who already have a Google Voice account making my measly post mute, but I haven’t really seen that many so here’s my .02. I received my Google Voice invite on Friday evening June 26 and immediately signed up. Now that I have been using it for the better part of a week it has already started to feel like one of the applications you-don’t-know-how-you-ever-lived-without. You can read all about Google Voice here so I won’t waste your time spelling out every feature but only mention the ones I have come to appreciate the most. The first is that you have four chooses when a call is coming in; you can of course, press 1, to answer it; press 2 to have the incoming caller go directly to voice mail; press 3 to listen-in live while the voice mail is being recorded, or press 4 to record the conversation. Pressing 4 makes the announcement “Recording” so the caller knows they are being recorded. Somewhat surprising I have also enjoyed the voice-to-text feature that I expected would be klugey at best but has in-fact been very useful and the conversion of speech to text surprisingly actuate. Also nice is receiving that text as a SMS message on my cell phone. One thing did catch me off guard and I have not yet found a way to change it is…When someone calls you for the first time Google Voice sees the incoming caller ID as a new caller and asks the person to record their name so when your phone rings you hear that person’s name recorded in their own voice…fine; except when, a business, which may have hundreds of lines all sharing one out-going caller ID. So now when I receive a call from XYZ business it always announced to me as the name of the first person who called me from that number. There are certain numbers that I would like Google voice to ask the caller each time to record their name so that I know whether I want to press 1 thru 4. I might even want to do this when several people in a household share one phone, because there are some people I want to answer the phone for and others I don’t. Anyway I betcha Google will fix that issue pretty quickly, but hey for free I’m not complaining, and unlike Gmail it’s not in Beta



