aaron hughling online

Since Google recently adopted another technology, now offering a free online phone service, I thought I'd go ahead and see what it's all about.

Google Voice is pretty cool overall, here are some pros and cons before heading in:

Pros:

1. It's free, unless you make international calls
2. It's true, the one number (that you choose from Google) will now ring all your numbers.
3. Texting is free!
4. Voicemails left on your Google number get transcribed into text. Now, that begs the question of quality. So far, for me, it's about 50-50. I've had some that have been understandable, and some that have completely not been.
5. You have complete control, you can screen callers, manage what phones ring for which people, etc etc.
6. When you have a call coming in, you can even decide on-the-fly if you want to let it go to voicemail, and even then, you can listen to the voicemail as it happens.
7. You can choose all your notifications. So you can choose to be notified via text or email or whatever.
8. Like Gmail, you don't need to delete anything, you can just archive away.
   

Cons:

1. No app yet for iPhone, but mobile site works decent.
2. Minutes on your cell phone. I have an iPhone, so I use AT&T. All calls I make, day or night, to other AT&T numbers are free. But if I use my Google Voice number to make them, or people call my Google Voice number from AT&T, it won't be free anymore.

It'll be interesting to see how this new service performs on the popularity chart. This type of innovation really needs to happen from our normal carriers. Hopefully it'll gain enough momentum to force some better services from the major wireless carriers.

Here's the official Google Voice About page for more information too.