Google Voice: Calling service explained

Following all of the recent news regarding Google Voice a lot of people have been confused about what exactly it is the service does, even people ‘in the industry’ sometimes don’t quite understand what Google Voice offers. Well now arstechnica have created an article which guides people on the Google Voice service, I will highlight some of the most important information below, however if you would like to see the fully detailed article, follow this link.

Google acquired a company called GrandCentral in 2007, Grand Central had been running since 2005 and the service allowed users to register a new phone number and direct it to ring multiple phones, this is the basic concept of Google Voice today, however many more features are now available.

With GoogleVoice you can choose phones across different countries to ring when you Google Voice number is dialed, better still these numbers can be changed easily through the Google Voice interface. Imagine if you had three separate workplaces across a country and you never wanted to miss a call, this service would allow all three workplaces to be contacted on one number. This service is completely free, however may be add supported in the future.

Another feature the service supports is call screening, you can have the service ask who’s calling you before you answer, this allows you to either take the call or forward to voicemail, this can save you a lot of time with annoying ‘spam’ calls. You can create groups of numbers which you recognize that will not be prompted to let you know their name before the call goes through. If you forward someone a voicemail you can listen in as they leave it too.

There are a lot more features discussed in the full article, these features include free calls, phone call recording, voicemail transcribes and SMS options. Rather then me repeat what has been said on arstechnica I would recommend checking out their full article.