Google Voice: Where Does It...

I admit, I am a geek.  For most of my life, I have been interested in, if not at times fanatical about technology.  To be honest, microcomputer operating systems are my passion (starting with cpm, dos, unix, pcmos, novell, windows, linux, mac to name a few), however I enjoy internetworking (LAN/WAN) easily as much.  I guess that would explain why Deerfield has been involved with IP PBX’s over the last 4 years or so (in addition to many other internetworking technologies over the past 2.5 decades).

So, in my spare time – I like to play, and keep abreast of emerging technology.  Especially if it is technology that in some way competes with products or services that we offer.  This time my muse is Google Voice – Google’s foray into the VM meets “single number reach”.  I have been testing and working with Google Voice for a couple of months, and while I am still trying to figure out where it fits into my telephony plan personally, I do think that it is a neat product.  Who’s it for?  If you want the short answer – I would say individual’s and SOHO business.  For those of you that wanted to know only that, you can stop reading now.

For those of you that want to know more; There are some really cool things about Google Voice.  The first thing that I need to point out is that there are two offerings from Google for Google Voice and in the onset you have to choose one or the other.  The first offering is to utilize an existing number that you own, and the second is to use a new Google Voice number.  I chose this second option because when I read the features – this was the more powerful of the two.  If you want to know the exact differences, you can look here.

The things that stand out to me are this – first it is very flexible in allowing you to configure what phones are going to ring when someone calls your Google Voice number, and how these calls are handled.  It even allows you to group callers and have different phones ring, and VM options based upon the calling party.  So for example – you can separate your friends, family, and co-workers into different groups and have unique ring patterns, and VM options for each group.

Additionally, Google puts its search technology on top of this, and also its Gmail technology, and it also allows you to send/receive SMS messages from your Google Voice account.  What you end up with is a single Gmail like interface that allows you to store, sort, read, and search all of your SMS and VM messages. Nice.

The coolest feature (IMHO) is the message transcription capability, which will take a VM message and transcribe it into a text message that you can read in the Google Voice interface, email client, or mobile device. Very cool.  You can read the VM like an email message without having to open a large attachment.  So far, I have to say that I am impressed with the accuracy so far – it’s not perfect, but very usable.  I am also using a Moto Droid, and I am assuming that they are using the same speech-to-text technology found in the Droid OS.

What’s been not completely clear to me is exactly how to use Google Voice personally.  Since we run our business on 3CX Phone System for Windows, most of this capability is built-in, so the only major feature that we are missing is the speech-to-text capability (hint, hint, lol ..).  For testing purposes, I’ve kind of made my cell phone a “silo” of sorts – which is not optimal.  So for me, having access to a modern IP PBX like 3CX, Google Voice does not add that much, but for a small company with an aging dinosaur (or no) phone system, or a small home business – Google Voice might a nice solution.