Google Voice After a Week

This Tuesday, I got something exciting in my email inbox: an invite to Google Voice! I’d signed up a few months ago, but wasn’t expecting to hear anything for a while; I knew people who had signed up over a year ago. So I figured, when they began sending out the invites, there would be a lot of people between them and me.

I guess Google sent out a lot of invites.

When I first heard about the service, my interest was mainly business-related. At my current job, I have the freedom to work from home, my company’s office, or the client’s office (I mainly only work with one client). The freedom is nice, but with it comes the hassle of making sure people can contact me between three phones. Google Voice, quite obviously, solves this problem; I now have one number they can call and it will reach me wherever I happen to be.

As I began placing and receiving calls through Google Voice at work, I discovered another very useful feature: notes. GV keeps a log of all calls you place, receive, and miss, which you can view on the web site. This can be helpful in and of itself, because you can see who you called and when. What’s better is the ability to add a note to your call log. I have been using this with my work calls so I can keep track of what I talked about with people. This, I think, can be very helpful not only for work but also when talking to customer service or tech reps.

Another feature that sounds promising is recording. In addition to making an audio recording of the call, I believe GV will also provide a transcript as it does with voicemail (I’m not sure about this, though). This sounds like it would be really useful when, for example, dealing with customer service reps. However, there are a couple things that keep this from being what it could be.

First of all, you can currently only record inbound calls. This is probably a technical issue (since you interact with Google Voice through the DTMF tones, calling a phone tree, for example, would present a conflict), but it severely limits the usefulness of the feature. It isn’t very often that a customer service rep calls me.

Secondly, people are kind of freaked about the idea of recording calls. To comply with local and federal laws, the GV service will announce when the call is being recorded. This is likely to make the other person nervous, and they may not feel comfortable speaking at all with a recorder on. I’ve read somewhere that some companies actually train their reps to end the call if it’s being recorded (despite the fact that they record your calls). I’m not sure if that is true, though I think if it is, I would probably not want to do business with such a company.

Overall, Google Voice is a pretty cool service. However, there is one major drawback: it adds an extra level of complexity to the simple process of using a telephone. This is probably intrinsic to the nature of the service, but I can think of some ways it could be improved.

Receiving calls is probably about as good as it gets. On your end, when you receive a call, you pick up whatever phone you want, and the first thing you hear is GV’s announcement of who is calling. You can then choose to answer the call or send them to voicemail. Sending them to voicemail presents a couple options as well: you can just forward them and hang up or you can listen in as they record their voicemail. This last option is similar to what people often did with answering machines before caller id.

On the caller’s end, the default behavior is that, if the caller is in you contacts list, they immediately hear ringing. If the caller is unrecognized, Google Voice asks them to record their name to play back to you when you pick up. This behavior is configurable, so that you can choose to require this of all unknown callers, only blocked callers, or turn it off completely.

Placing a call, however, is where things get complicated. You have two options for placing a call: first, you can log onto the website (or the mobile site) and select the person you want to call. GV will ask you which phone you want to use, and then it will dial both your phone and the person you’re calling. When you pick up, you’ll be connected.

However, what if I’m out and about, and don’t want to log onto the mobile site from my phone? I can then call my own GV number, put in my pin, and select to make an outbound call. Then I enter the number I want to dial and it connects me.

The problem here is that many of us, having gotten used to just pulling up a number from our address lists, don’t know very many phone numbers off the top of our heads. There are ways to circumvent this; for example, you can edit the person’s number in your address book to first dial GV, pause, enter your pin, pause, select 1, pause, and enter the number. This automates your calling, but is still a bit of a hassle.

I think there is a fairly simple way to automate the system, though: voice recognition. Google already uses voice recognition in their GOOG-411 service (a free directory assistance service), and cell phones have been using voice dialing for some time now (my past 3 cell phones have supported it). Honestly, I’m surprised they haven’t already implemented this.

Sorry this has been such a long post, but I had a lot to say. Google Voice is a very promising service. Sure, it’s got a few issues, but I’m sure, over time, they’ll work them out. Some issues, I think, are unavoidable with a system like this, but people can adapt. If they get the issues they can fix worked out though, I may well begin using my Google Voice number for personal as well as business calls.