Google Voice For Dummies

Bud E. Smith, Chris Dannen

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780470546994
• eBook ISBN: 9780470585412
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Entreprise Applications
• Index: Computer Science

Save time and money with Google's revolutionary new phone system

Google Voice combines existing phone lines, e-mail, and Web access into one central communication channel. Tech industry watchers expect it to give Skype some serious competition, yet little information is available on this new Google service.

Google Voice For Dummies is the first and only book on Google's breakthrough new offering and provides essential information for individuals and businesses who want to take advantage of this exciting new technology.

• Google Voice is expected to have a major impact on telephony and to offer major cost savings for individuals and businesses
• This guide focuses on an in-depth understanding of setting up and using Google Voice and how to integrate it with other Google services, including Gmail, Google Chat, and Google Talk
• Discusses managing Google Voice within organizations and examines key concerns for business, schools, government, and other kinds of organizations
• Explains how Google Voice connects with the many phone options currently available and how to move toward an optimized and inexpensive, yet flexible and powerful phone environment
• The book is supported by news and updates on www.gvDaily.com, the leading Google Voice question and answer site created by authors Bud E. Smith and Chris Dannen

Google Voice For Dummies supplies much-needed information on this free and exciting technology that the New York Times has called revolutionary.

Part I

Setting Up Google Voice

In this part . . .

Google Voice changes and improves the way your phones work for you. Here we show you how to get it set up right the first time, including how to save time and money with Google Voice.

Chapter 1

A Day in Your Google Voice Life

In This Chapter

Discovering what Google Voice can do

Using Google Voice in the morning

Getting through the workday with Google Voice

Using Google Voice at home

Understanding the bottom line

Google Voice is a marvelous mashup — all the power and control we associate with computers at their best, combined with the warmth, spontaneity, and flexibility of talking to other people. Although you need to spend some time figuring out how to get the most out of Google Voice, the service can ultimately simplify your life.

Google Voice is not only powerful and capable in its own right, but it works alongside other Google services. You can get a lot out of it for personal use, and take it even further in a business context.

Google Voice is not to be confused with Google’s Voice Search, which allows you to search the Internet by speaking words out loud; nor with Google Talk, a service for using a computer directly for text messaging and computer-to-computer voice conversations. Both of these are valuable services, but they don’t overlap with Google Voice, which allows you to fuse all your telephone lines into one central, Web-accessible hub.

Google Voice helps you manage real live phones, with all the voice quality and convenience that only a telephone has, along with voicemail for all of them. Unlike Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) services, Google Voice lets you add the convenience of the Web while preserving the voice quality and convenience that only a telephone can offer.

And Google Voice saves you time, money, and hassle. Anyone can improve their life with Google Voice — while businesses can do even more, by cutting costs and adding services in a way that can not only reduce expenses, but really move the needle on what a business can offer customers.

Discovering Google Voice

Google Voice reduces the cost of calls, making national calls free and international ones much cheaper — perhaps a tenth the cost of a direct-dialed cell phone call. And Google Voice notifies you of voicemail messages and allows you to record phone calls, so that you can manage conversations as well as the phones themselves.

Here’s how it works: Google Voice gives you a single, virtual phone number, from almost any area code in the U.S. that you’d like. That number, in turn, can ring any or all of your other phone lines — your work phone, cell phone, and so on, meaning that you can be reached with just one number.

Google Voice also changes the way you can handle calls. Like any phone service, it records voicemail messages. And it sends you notification that a voicemail message is waiting.

You can also screen callers and listen in on voicemail messages before deciding whether to pick up the call, just like an old-fashioned answering machine. And it lets you block callers, send certain numbers straight to voicemail, and set up custom mailbox greetings for discrete callers. You can record calls on the fly, send and receive SMS text messages, and keep your entire call history online.

All of these capabilities were part of GrandCentral, the service that Google bought in 2007 and made the foundation for Google Voice. Google Voice adds several new capabilities.

One is support for text messaging, or SMS, from your GrandCentral phone number. This feature was missing in GrandCentral but is added in Google Voice, making the service much more seamless to use. Figure 1-1 shows the SMS interface, new with Google Voice.

A wonderful bonus, though, is very inexpensive international calls — a few cents a minute to most countries, instead of ten or more cents, or even the better part of a dollar, per minute from different land line and cell phone plans.

But it also allows you to access your voicemail messages and listen to them online. You can forward a message to a friend or embed it in a Web site. Most amazingly, Google Voice transcribes your voicemail messages instantly — not perfectly, but surprisingly well, in most cases — so that you can read them on-screen, in your e-mail inbox, or as a text message. So if you’re staying in touch by e-mail, as more and more people do these days, you don’t have to leave text mode to stay in touch with, manage, and respond to your voice messages.

Google Voice also supports conference calls and call merging, so you can easily (and cheaply) plan a conference call. You can also spontaneously expand a typical two-person call to include more people. This is a major improvement for all of us who have not been able to make a conference call happen when we badly needed one. Google Voice also lets you switch an incoming call from one phone to another without hanging up and redialing and to record part or all of an incoming call.

Figure 1-1: Google Voice keeps you from making an SMS of things.

Google Voice is potentially useful for anyone, but it offers an additional level of ease and utility when used with a smartphone. Google Voice-specific applications are also already available for iPhone and Google Android.

There’s much more, as we describe throughout this book. But you can already see that Google Voice can make a big difference in how — and how effectively — you can use your phones.

Waking Up with Google Voice

Let’s begin with a typical workday as it might unfold for you using Google Voice. Google Voice makes you more capable and accessible with regard to work, yet at the same time better able to protect your personal life and personal time.

Even if you don’t work, much of the following applies to attending school, volunteering, keeping up with friends — anything that you do in groups. (And all things that you have...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I: Setting Up Google Voice
• Part II: Maximizing Your Voice
• Part III: Maximizing Your Handset
• Part IV: Playing Well with Others
• Part V: The Part of Tens