Tech tips -
You know the face of communication is changing. What once was new like texting, messaging, voip, sip and email are all common parts of day-to-day activity now. Certainly not considered new!
Blackberries, iPhones, skype, and gizmo, it is a treat watching all the different technologies unfold. I am always wondering "what next?"
By no means a new idea, others have been doing similar things, but an idea that has recently caught my attention is Google Voice. GV is an online way to manage all your voice communications.
What does that mean? Well, lets say you have a mixture of phones, both cell and land lines, all with individual numbers. Wouldn't it be extremely useful if you could give out just one phone number and then choose which phone rings depending on who is calling? That is the crux of GV.
Sign up for GV, get a phone number from them, input the phone numbers for all your devices, then decide how you want your incoming calls routed. For example, maybe you want calls from your wife to ring all of your phones, home, cell and business. (Maybe calls from your girlfriend should just ring the cell phone). Maybe calls from your boss should go straight to voice mail. You choose! GV gives you instantaneous management capability right from your browser.
GV is also taking voice mail to a new level. Remember the old days when everyone had an answering machine. You listen to the message as it is being recorded and pick up the phone part way through, if you like what you were hearing that is.
You can do the same with GV. You can also download your voice mail as an mp3 or even choose to have your voicemail transcribed. Read it instead of listen to it. Another cool feature is the ability to record personal greetings for different callers. Again, one greeting for the wife, a different one for the girlfriend!
Of course, you can do all the standard stuff like screening unknown name unknown number callers or blocking specific phone numbers. You can begin instantly recording a call or initiate a conference call via GV.
Sounds really interesting, doesn't it?!
There are some issues to be worked out. Reading the "how to" and "faq" sections indicate that you have to follow some procedures for such things as outbound calling so that your GV phone number is the one that shows up on call display and not the phone you are calling from. And other little things to get around long distance charges and the like would be a little inconvenient however, those issues will be solved I am sure.
Right now, GV is in an invite only stage, meaning only select users who have signed up for an invitation at www.google.com\voice are being accepted and given a GV phone number. And, realistically you must live in the United States to participate.
GV is free and calling within the US is also free. GV hopes to have numbers available for all the American area codes. GV is also working on number porting. (i.e. enabling you to use your current phone number instead of being issued a new number from Google)
Rumor has it GV will also become available in Canada.
toddmusseau@gmail.com
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