I've been playing with it yesterday and today. All seems good so far. Calls are free (well, as long as your cell plan has sufficient minutes or if you have an unlimited plan) within the US and the service provides low international rates (which I haven't yet tried because I'm not sure how this will work with the cell pone charges). So far, I have calls routed to home and cell. I have not yet had the calls routed to my office.
Of course, there is seamless integration with your Google contacts, so if you have telephone numbers there, you can place calls directly from your computer. You will get a telephone call, then be connected to the person with whom you'd like to speak. If the person has caller ID, your Google Voice number is the one that will be displayed for them. Very cool.
GV provides a voicemail transcription service. Voicemail transcription isn't the best, but to be fair, I didn't ask folks in my greeting to s-p-e-a-k c-l-e-a-r-l-y when leaving a message. As with any voice recognition program, there isn't 100% accuracy, but in the test messages I received, there was greater than 80, perhaps 85% accuracy in the transcription. Not bad, I would say.
I'm not sure how many of you will remember MCI One (which I had, I dunno, about 15 years ago). This service would provide you with one number that would ring wherever you wanted it to - home, cell, office, pager. I thought this was so great at the time (it was!) and if MCI didn't have such horrible customer services practices at the time they would certainly have kept me as a customer.
I'll give the Google Voice a chance to convince me that this is the only number I should give to folks when I'm sharing a telephone number.
Try it!
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