yay - Received my Google Voice invite
Amazing service, my first thoughts. I'm sure from some of the other posts on blogs and so on you probably have a rough idea of what Google Voice is/how it works. I'll explain it anyway..
Making Calls
If you wish to call people using GV, you must simply have an already-existing phone line. A cell phone, home phone, something that can accept calls basically. When you click "Call" you enter the number you wish to call, then select the number of which you want GV to call you. Which in this simple scenario, it'd be the first phone number you added (unless you added more).
After this point your phone should ring, greeted with silence!--Then it'll start ringing, in which then it is connecting you to the person (or machine) you're trying to call. Easy enough, eh? And wala!Your Google Voice number shows up on their Caller ID!
Receiving Calls
Receiving calls is VERY easy--As you set a forward number, it'll ring that line whenever someone calls your GV number. And if you don't answer, it'll go to your GV voicemail, not your home phone (very nifty).
Voicemail + Translation
The voicemail is actually decent, as voicemail is about the same anywhere you go. However, GV provides you a service that some other voice services charge for, and that's voicemail transcribing. Oh yea, read the voicemail someone left for you - It's not the BEST at the moment however: very neat feature that they snuck in on me (that I didn't see upfront) was that your voicemails are also translated while in the transcribing process.
Yea, that's right. While I was leaving myself a voicemail, I said "ciao" at the end of it, and then noticed that the voicemail said "hey" - I then went on to speak a little French ... that didn't work out so well; Not sure if it was my bad French or it was wrong? I was going to try Spanish but I figured it'd result in the same thing. Although, it did misinterpret some of my other words that I said in English.
That's really all there is to Google Voice. Of course, it is just the simple Vo-IP solution, with tons of features (with low calling rates).
Some things that would be neat to see
With all the Google services becoming even more useful than they ever were to me, I thought it'd be neat that: If they allowed a user of an existing service (on Google) ... se, AdSense to be able to transfer their earnings into their account for later use with Google Voice.
I think this would be a reasonable approach, but then again I suppose there is some other possibilities to face when doing so.
Another thing would be to allow a user to set their Caller ID. For example, when I called myself, it said the city/state - It'd be cool if you could by reasonable measures and maybe a small deposit, to have your own name displayed on the Caller ID--For personalization reasons. I'm sure people are going to start wandering why I'm calling from another city ... lol
Anyway, I'm happy to have received Google Voice 😀 - Thank you Google.