Much to my pleasant surprise, I got an invitation to Google Voice a few minutes ago. I’m surprised because I was VERY late requesting to join Grand Central, and that was closed by the time I did. I don’t know if Gmail users are getting priority or what.
Did any of you get the invite, and what are you planning to use it for? I’m not a huge phone talker, but I want my parents and a few others to have an easy way to track me down if they need me. I have several phone numbers, and I think my folks find that a little confusing sometimes. :)
I’ve been in for a few months. It’s neat, but I wouldn’t use it much unless I port my current number over to Google Voice. However, I’m not certain I want to port my number over since Google and Internet services in general are mostly reliable, but less so than phone service.
During setup, you can specify what phone number you want. You can search for strings of number or characters… so if you want to keep 1234 in your number, you can see what’s available in your area code.
At least, this is how normal people would use it. Since I have the maturity level of your average junior highschooler, my new phone number is (###)86-PUSSY.
I got in yesterday. It’s pretty neat. I changed my work number to google voice, and now have some hilarious transcribed indian voicemails to show around the office.
I got my invite 2 days ago and spent 20 minutes trying to find a really cool phone number. In the end I managed to get (848) my first name and middle initial. Easy to remember at least.
One thing that confuses me is that you can place calls through Voice (either through the site or by calling your number and using a code) and call anywhere in the US for free. They mean free in a ‘no additional charges apply’ way right? Not totally free US calls?
It’s free as far as google voice is concerned. How it all works out with your minutes on your cell plan I’m not quite sure of yet. I think a call through them would count as an incoming call to your cell?
It’s cool, but the main problem is the potential number confusion to the people you are calling which Jose’s link explains better than I can:
Once all that is ironed out this is a seriously killer app. If I can port my number to them and then they can make it easy for me to make that number appear to who I am calling, from whatever device – awesome.
So I think I got an answer to my question. After reading through the GVoice forums it looks like:
Anyone calling your GV number will be charged any applicable local/long distance fees through their phone company (based on your GV area code).
Calling your own GV number (to place a call or check voice mail) will also have any applicable local/long distance fees applied.
Placing calls through the Voice website (having Google initiate the call) however is free for both you and the number you’re calling, as they both count as incoming calls.
So Google is providing free phone service provided you place the call through the GV website and have phone service that gives you free incoming calls. How Google can pull this off is a mystery to me.
DUNDI:
Distributed Universal Number Discovery (DUNDi) is a VoIP routing protocol that provides directory services similar to what is provided by ENUM.
In simple terms, it is like asking your neighbouring peer whether he knows how to reach a certain phone-extension or VoIP client. Some sort of P2P phonebook.
Yep, and now that it’s a jailbroken app he can replace apple’s dialer, messaging, etc, with gvoice equivalents and of course run in the background. Silver lining.
Just signed up for Google Voice, and it’s pretty sweet so far. One fun issue, though (and it doesn’t affect me directly).
I asked a friend of mine to call me and test out my new number - everything went well. He called from our office line, got the google operator, and recorded his name as “Fuck off, bitch”. Hilarity ensued, everything seemed to work fine.
Later, I tried calling my google number from my own office line, and was suprised when it didn’t ask me my name. When my cell rang, it identified the caller as “Fuck off, bitch”.
All of our office numbers appear to come from the same number on caller ID, so it seems that google will remember the caller’s name from the incoming number. We tested it with someone else’s google number, and it appears that google remembers the caller’s name for each number separately.
In other words, if you call person A, person A will always hear the same caller name if you call from the same number. If you then call person B, you’ll have to leave your name again.
For a few minutes, we thought that anyone calling out of our office to a google voice number would be identified as “Fuck off, bitch”. If I’d planned ahead, I would have had him use “shit, bonerz”.
If they carried the caller name info across all google voice destination numbers the system would be very open to abuse by caller id spoofers and such, so I’m not too surprised they make you re-identify yourself for each google voice destination number you call.
My favorite google voice feature is the text-to-speech-to-SMS feature for voicemails. It can be amazing useful to have information people left for you (a phone number, address, etc) in text form on the phone without having to listen to a whole voicemail to get it, and the tts engine works really well against most voices.
My unfavorite google voice feature is just that it can be a real pain to get people to use your google voice number when they already have your cell phone entered into their cell phones. I’m tempted to change my cell number and only give out my google voice number to force people to contact me via google voice, but that would also be a PITA.
Trivia: You can’t use the same mobile device as a forwarding number for more than one account, or the same land line as a forwarding number for more than two accounts. I wonder why mobiles are locked to one?
You also can’t use one Google Voice number as forwarding number for another account, which begins to answer the question I was going to ask about “What’s to stop people from just snatching up tons of numbers?”
edit: I guess thinking about it more, locking mobiles to one makes sense; they don’t really want you with a lot of Google Voice accounts going to the same number. The anomaly is land lines being allowed to go to two, which I imagine is a concession to the fact that cell phones are usually one per person, but landlines are still often shared.
