One Number, For Life – Google Voice

Google has made something fun again. This time it’s your phone number. Google Voice is a service, originally called Grand Central, which Google acquired in mid-2007.

Google Voice gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail as easy as email, and lots of cool calling features like voicemail transcripts, call screening and blocking, conference calling and more.

When you sign up for the service, you are given the option to select a phone number – even search for number patterns, or words in the phone number. For example, if your name is “Adam”, and you live in Austin, TX, Google Voice might tell you that the phone number 512-850-2326 is available.

Web

The web interface of the service integrates tightly with your Google account.  Any contacts that you have setup in Google, will also show up in Google Voice.  Running with the one number mentality that Google Voice is trying to get users to adopt, it hopes to become your hub for all things phone-related; text messaging (SMS as they call it), voicemail, custom greetings based on caller. You can give somebody one number, and you can decide where the call should get forwarded to, on a group level or per-contact.

Another great feature of the web interface, is that you can send free text messages from your computer.  When the recipient replies to your SMS, the transcript gets added to your Google Voice history so you can go back and look at conversations later also. The same goes for voicemail, as it becomes a hub for keeping track of all voicemail messages, treating them more like email. You can also forward voicemail messages to someone just as if it were an email.

Mobile

So, the list really goes on about what features this exciting new service can offer you. Let’s look at the mobile side of this briefly.

There is a new mobile apps overview page that gives some options for Android and Blackberry users which look very interesting. I am an iPhone user, so I will share my experience there.  There is a mobile web version which can be used in the browser to use all the same functionality as you would from your computer – send SMS, make calls, check history, etc. Here is what it looks like:

Last week, as I was looking into the possibility of using Google Voice more, I found an iPhone application called GV Mobile. There is a free version and a paid version($2.99 in the App Store). With the Free version, you can make calls on your iPhone, that would then actually show as coming from your Google Voice number.  Although with the Full version, you are given the full feature set that you get online, all in a pretty little app to send and receive SMS, check voicemail, make calls, etc.

This is a powerful service that places Google in the middle of the consumer and the 2010 web. Currently the service is open by invitation only, but you can request an invite here. A couple of Xcentric employees recently received their invites – which for a while they thought would never come.  If you have any questions about Google Voice, or want to share any of your experience, leave a comment, or find me on Twitter.