If you are unfamiliar with Google Voice, it is a new online telephone routing service available for public beta testing. In order to enroll in the service you must request an invitation at https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlevoiceinvite/

The Good:

• Google Voice lets you set up a single telephone number that will simultaneously forward to any number of other telephone lines.
• When adding a telephone line to your Google Voice account, you must demonstrate that you can pick up and answer on the line.
• Once a line has been added to your Google Voice account, you can route your calls out through Google Voice so that you will give the same caller ID regardless of what phone you use.
• You can set up custom outgoing voicemail messages for different groups or individuals.
• Google Voice is a Free Service for everything except outbound international calls.

The Bad:

• It can take anywhere from two days to several weeks to respond to an invitation request.
• While any number of phones or e-mail addresses can be associated with a single Google Voice account, no phone or e-mail address can be associated with two Google Voice accounts at the same time.

The Ugly:

• Google’s Voice to Text process is still a work in progress. While some automated transcripts come through perfectly, others are thoroughly unintelligible. For best results, your callers must, as Fats Waller put it, “speak slowly and distinctly.”

3 Uses for Google Voice

The Personal Telephone Number:

The stated intent of Google Voice is to act as a personal and portable telephone number. Calls to your Google Voice number can reach your home number when you are at home, your cell number when you are out and about, and your office number when you are at work.

Should one of your telephone numbers change, you can just put the new number into Google Voice and it will be able to reach that telephone number instead.

The Automated Interview:

This was how we at Marissa Berger first used Google Voice. From the online interface we set our Google Voice account to Do Not Disturb. This meant that the service sent anyone who called our Google Voice number directly to its associated voicemail box without ringing any of our telephones. The outgoing message is limited to thirty seconds, but with careful planning you can still give a good prompt in that time.

If you need to follow up on a call, you can connect through Google Voice, so that whatever phone you use, your call will be seen to come from the Interview line.

Once it’s time to retire a specific interview, you can simply log onto Google Voice and change your Google Voice number.

The Virtual PBX:

By putting your entire customer service, sales, or telephone reception team on the same Google Voice account, you can ensure that one telephone call will ring all their numbers simultaneously, no matter where they are. So long as at least one team member is available, Google Voice will ring their phone.

If nobody is available to answer, you will know that callers will go to a team voicemail box and set the service to send and e-mail or SMS to each member of the team letting them know that nobody answered the call.

Since return calls can be routed through the Google Voice number, team members who do not want to give out their direct numbers do not need to worry about Caller ID.

And as an added bonus, you can create add a Google widget to the relevant page of your website so that visitors can call the team with only a click.

Other Applications

There are undoubtedly other ways to take advantage of the services associated with Google Voice.  If you have one you’d like to share, reply to this post.