Google Voice With Your Existing Phone Number

So, I got a Google Voice account some time ago, but I just never got around to doing much with it.

First of all, I dislike the voice mail model: having to call a special number and futzing with phone menus, then having to listen to an audio message, and often having to write down a phone number to call back… well, it’s just a ridiculous model. For years my voice mail message has been something like ‘I don’t like voice mail so please email me or text me.’

But now that Google made me aware (via Miguel Helft at the NY Times) that Google Voice is easily configured to work with my existing number, I took the bait and tried it out.

This is going to change everything for me, just like Spinvox did for awhile, a few years ago. But this is free.

I set it all up, following instructions here, and the experience is transformative.

Here’s the result of me calling myself: a transcribed voicemail in the Google Voice inbox.

 

It’s funny that the only word that was incorrectly transcribed was ‘Google’ — here typed as ‘global’ — but way better than the Dragon Voice app on my iPhone.

So I thought ‘Cool, but too bad it doesn’t show up in Gmail.’ So I went to Gmail to see if there was some way to get that to work, and the voice mail was already in my Gmail inbox! Yay!

 

And I also received the transcription as a text message on my phone:

 

So, I no longer hate voice mail because I won’t have to mess with it any more. Go ahead, leave me voice mail. I’m down with that now.