Life has been really busy lately, with camp rapidly approaching, and the sprint towards the end of the school year. I'm trying to get phase 1 of a new website for the school up and running by the time I run off to camp, and spending a lot of free time to the end, so the blog has been neglected.

Chris Hill is jonesing to get onto Google Voice and was curious as to my impressions of it, since as a GrandCentral user, I have access to the beta.

What's the Concept Behind This Stuff?

You sign up and get a special phone number that lets you ring all of your phones at once, as well as have centralized voicemail. So when someone is coming over to your house for a service call, give them your Google Voice number and it will ring all the numbers you enter into it at once. You can set up groups using your Google Contacts. So if one of Jamie's friends calls, her cellphone rings and our home phone rings. If one of mine calls, I have my work phone, home phone, and cell phone ringing. If a family member calls, I have all of them ring. You can turn on/off phones on the site, which is handy because sometimes my mother-in-law takes care of a visit by pest control, etc. to our house. When those are about to happen, I turn on their phone, so it will ring too.

You also have a centralized voicemail box on the website, so if you go to just exclusively using your new phone number, all voice mail from work, cell, home, could go into the same mailbox.

Google Voice vs GrandCentral

What Google brought to the table was integration with Google Contacts, and Voicemail transription. Now when I get a voicemail, I get an email with a transcription of the voicemail, and also a text message with the transcription. That way I know if it's something I need to deal with.

At work, we are getting ready to move to a VOIP system next year, none too soon. I can't stand seeing the red voicemail light on my phone, because I have to wait for a dialtone, hit 699 and wait, enter my extension, enter my password, and hit *20, and then if there's a fast talker and a long message with some important phone number, etc. I have to listen to it over and over again in its entirety.

With GoogleVoice, you know instantly whether this is something that requires your immediate attention, or if it can wait. If the transcription is bad, you can always scrub through the audio version.

The one annoying thing about the transition to GV is that all of my settings were basically wiped. So for a few days, all my phones were ringing.

But I like the convenience of the transcription so much, that I just call-forwarded all calls to my home phone to Google Voice, so now my home phone doesn't even ring.