Reality Upgrade

Google Voice is a new service by Google that seems like it could save a lot of time and effort.  The service gives you a phone number, and then lets you add phone numbers to your account and set up different caller settings, so that different callers ring through to different phones.  You can also have some callers rings straight through to voice mail. And, get this, it converts the voice mail to text, and emails it to you.  

This is great for someone like me.  I hate to be interrupted by phone spam, but then I miss calls from my bank.  And then I have to listen to intermitably long voice mails with someone rambling for five minutes before mumbling their phone number faster than I can write.  This seems much easier.

One update to this service that just came out is integration with Android.  So if you have a G1, and all your contacts are already integrated with Google, this can be an especially useful service.  With the Android plugin, you can actually use your Android phone to place calls where the caller ID will show your Google Voice number. 

As an added bonus, this service lets you give out your phone number with impunity, and not worry about it.  This can be especially useful for anyone who has a tendancy to give out a lot of buisiness cards to random people (ahem).

The service is not open to the general public yet, but it should be soon.  When it does, I’ll try it out and report back.