Missing Google Voice Feature Gives Me a Bad Connection
My patience was rewarded over the weekend: the GrandCentral beta account I opened in July of 2007 is now a Google Voice account. I can now use one single number for centralized voice communications, routing calls to various phones. I tested the voicemail and the transcription via SMS works great as well. I also made Google my “book of record” for Contacts some time ago, and even though the Contact app is still underpowered, this was a good move for me. There’s only one problem: nobody really has my Google Voice phone number.
Since GrandCentral was a beta service and I had no idea that Google might buy them, I never fully embraced the offering. Back then, I didn’t know if the service would survive or slowly fade away. So now, only a handful of folks actually have the phone number that GrandCentral assigned to me way back when. Now I could use the handy little e-mail generator in Google Voice to notify a thousand people, but I really don’t want to burden them with managing my information. (That’s one reason I’m liking Palm’s upcoming Pre: the Synergy function requires other folks to manage their contact info for me. I can kick back into “contact-management auto-pilot”!)
A far better choice is one that I don’t have: porting an existing cell-phone number over to Google Voice. That would be the ideal solution for me to jump in the Google Voice pool with both feet. Aside from the tons of contacts I have in Google, there are hundreds of folks that have my current cell number, but aren’t in my contacts list: folks like exhibitors at trade shows and PR people. I can’t easily tell them about my new Google Voice number, so number portability would be ideal here.
Google knows that this might be an appealing option: on their Google Voice suggestion page, it’s one of the pre-filled suggestions and I duly clicked a vote for it. Until I see that feature, I’m hard-pressed to fully use the new service I waited for.
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For a site that by all appearances was nearly dormant – Google sure is taking their sweet time converting over the remaining Grandcentral accounts.
On the other hand, I don’t know what I’ll do with myself if I’m not rushing home to see if my account converted yet..
Kevin, just post your number here and I promise I’ll call you at least once a day. :-)
Why not just set up your regularly used number to forward to your Google Voice number?
Sure, a FW workaround would do the trick for now, but that sort of defeats the premise of a centralized voice communications tool. Besides, there would times when I’d have calls sent from my cell FW to Google which would then FW them right back. Seems kinda silly to me. ;) Anyway, my main point is that isn’t actually a beta (that I know of), so I wish they had this key feature in from the beginning.
I have forwarded my cell number to Google Voice. The only downside is the texts are not forwarded. ATT isn’t forwarding them.
other than that, it works great.
Google dominates the web and is trying to ensure its dominance spreads to mobile Internet too. The Google Voice announcement is step towards this goal.
Since last week an intense debate has been going on across the telecom world about Google Voice, aimed at disrupting the telecom and Internet industry: A bunch of Internet phones and messaging services are christened as Google Voice. Actually a Googly remix of GrandCentral, a start up it bought in 2007.
The debate is that how would this impact the carrier business? I guess the bigger question is that how would this impact Google’s most awaited innovation in the Telecom business – The Google Android Operating System?
Read the full article at http://www.telecomcircle.com/2009/03/googlevoice/