Family Tech: Google Voice can save the day

It’s one of those days. And now your cell phone slides out of your grasp and into a puddle of water. You’ve given all your customers that number. For the couple days until you can get your phone replaced through your phone’s insurance, your customers cannot reach you the way they are used to using.

Normally, I want to write here about tools that you can put to use right now. However, the tool I’m going to talk about today has a waiting list, so if I convince you of its value, you’ll need to get on the waiting list. If you have a dot mil e-mail account, you can be up and running tomorrow or so.

Google Voice is a telephone service. When you get an invitation to sign up you choose a phone number. Some people choose ones like 703-PET-ROCK to make it fun to hand out. I found one that started with 571 so everyone thinks I am giving out my cell phone number.

When you log in to the Google Voice Web site, you can choose how a call is handled. For example, set it to automatically forward the call to your cell phone. If you do nothing else with Google Voice, that is a major value. If your cell phone does get ruined, and you have given out your Google Voice number instead of your cell’s number, just go into Google Voice’s Web site and have it forward your calls to another number until you get a new cell phone.

You can have Google Voice forward your calls to multiple phone numbers. When someone calls your Google Voice number, your cell phone, your home phone, your direct work line can all ring at the same time. If you take the call on your cell phone as you are pulling into your drive way, you can press a button as you walk into the house and switch the call to your home phone, saving your cell minutes.

When someone calls Google Voice for the first time, it prompts the user to say their name. It then calls you and tells you who is calling. You can take the call, or send them to voice mail.

You can set up rules for groups of contacts. For example, a business caller automatically goes to voice mail on weekends. Or business callers get a different voice mail than personal calls. You can decide what phones each group gets to call. You can set what hours a phone is allowed to ring. For example, all calls to Google Voice go to voice mail from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Google Voice is great for those who need to give out their phone numbers generously but may wish later they were not quite so accessible for some people. If a sales person has a customer who feels entitled to call at 2 a.m. with questions, you can set it up so their calls always go to voice mail after 5 p.m.

When someone leaves a voice mail, Google Voice does its best to transcribe the message and send you an e-mail or text message of the voice mail. The transcription is not perfect, but I can tell by looking at my text message generally who called and why. That helps me decide the priority of calling them back.

Google Voice phone numbers can send and receive text messages too. In the Web interface, you don’t need to know what company your friend’s cell phone is on. I can send a text message from the Web interface, and responses come to the Web interface and to my cell phone. I can respond from my phone as well as the Web. Google Voice keeps a copy of all text messages and all text messages, voice mail transcriptions and call logs are searchable.

You can call internationally inexpensively. For example, the UK is 2 cents a minute; India, 7 cents; Iraq, 9 cents; Afghanistan, 29 cents; and Australia, 17 cents per minute.

I’ve even figured out a way to setup Google Voice to record my own quick notes. I can call it from my cell phone and record a quick thought (“Remember to pick up dog food”) and Google Voice will transcribe it, and e-mail and/or text it to me. Go online to the Web site mentioned below for specific instructions on doing this.

Right now, you do have to wait, possibly months, to get an invite. If you want an invite, go to http://www.google.com/voice and ask for one. If you do not yet have a Google Account, you’ll need to create one. It’s free and gives you access to Gmail, Google Documents and many more free services.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech. Mark’s blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and his e-mail address is .