Observer-Reporter forum

Cylinsier · Master Joined: 29 Sep 2008 Posts: 13229 Location: Oh shi-

Got my invite today and set up my inbox. Basically, google voice replaces your voice mail; people who call me will never know the difference, but when I get a voice mail now, I have the option of checking it normally on my phone, or logging into my voice account and hearing it on my computer, OR reading a written transcript of the message as well.

I can also add specific numbers into my contacts, and then assign them to groups. I can then record different greetings for these groups. Thus, a member of the friends group would hear, "hey, whats up," a co-worker would hear, "this is me, I'm unavailable," and family would hear, "hey mom and dad," or whatever. I'm not sure, but I think there's an option to send certain numbers directly to voicemail as well.

There was a second option to set up a new google number instead of using mine, but I skipped it because I didn't want to have to give out a new number. The extra feature with that option was you could have it filter your google call to any of your existing phone numbers, or all of them at once, or any combination, and also alter which phones receive what call by who is calling. And of course it receives voicemail from all of those phones and puts them in your account.

So far, its not a huge gamechanger of a service, but I really do like the idea of being able to get online and listen to a number of voicemails in whatever order I want, save them, or even just read them if I'm in a hurry.
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Cylinsier · Master Joined: 29 Sep 2008 Posts: 13229 Location: Oh shi-

So I got my first couple of voice mails the last few days and thought I'd share how this system works. After setting up your GV inbox, when your phone rings and you don't pick it up, the call is forwarded to GV instead of going to your voicemail.

How they do that, I do not know.

So GV then operates as your voicemail and records the message. The caller probably has no idea. Yes, this means the default "call voicemail" option on your cell no longer works. But I just saved my GV voicemail number (which it gives you when you set up and you should save, although you can always see it again by logging into you GV account) as a contact.

So when someone leaves you a voicemail, instead of your phone popping up and saying "hey bitch, you have a voicemail," you get mad text messages (up to 3) with a written version of your message. You can also log into your GV inbox, which works similarly to gmail, and view your voicemails as text there; you can mark as read or save as new or archive to various folders just like gmail. And yes, you can call into your voicemail from your phone to actually listen to the message OR listen to an audio recording of the message on your computer from your account. If you really want to know what the message says, you'll have to do the latter; it only writes out up to 3 texts worth of the message, plus its not too good with understanding what people said, so its only 80% legible thus far.

Still, its nice to be able to navigate your voicemails like email in an inbox, skipping to the ones you want to hear and keeping important ones as "new." Once they get the written part more efficient, it'll really be awesome.
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