No, really. Google Voice is awesome. At least, if you like the concept of GrandCentral, which I did and is why I signed up for it. But even better is that Google finally made some changes to it and they rock.
Let me start from the beginning. GrandCentral is a website that lets you choose a phone number to give to friends, family, coworkers, evil overlords, what-have-you. When those people call said number, it rings all the phones you own: your house phone, work phone, cell phone, even the pay phone outside your house if you so choose. If you answer from any of the phones you’ve listed, the call is routed to that specific phone. But, it goes one step further. If you don’t WANT to be bothered, you can listen in on voicemails to try and cut down on your telemarketing pain, block specific phone numbers and even schedule all UNKNOWN numbers to be blocked straight up. Then, voice messages are stored on the server for you to peruse at your convenience and even call back by clicking the call button and selecting which of your phones you’d like the call to be directed to, effectively masking your actual number inside of the GrandCentral number.
Enter Google, whom upon seeing this awesome service said, “WANT!” and snatched it up. They sat on it for a while, not making any changes until just recently when they announced Google Voice. The basic tenets of the service remain unchanged, however there are some spiffy new features. First and foremost is the option to have your voice messages transcribed and then e-mailed to you so you never have to log into the website to check your messages. This feature alone made me drool over the service. But I was made even happier when I discovered that I can log into the site (from my desktop or my iPhone) and send and receive SMS messages from my Google Voice number. And they are all archived online.
Needless to say, I’d love to see an iPhone app that combines all of these features into one place to use wherever I am. And if background notification ever comes to the iPhone, I can effectively rid myself of paid text messages. Thank you, Google. Now merge with Apple so that all of these features can become native to the iPhone. I’ll die happy.
