Oxtail_IHB
New member
...is pretty awesome. At first I thought it was just some weird VoIP thing like Skype, but it's not at all. My coworker got into the beta and told us to go to the site(<a href="http://www.google.com/voice/">http://www.google.com/voice/</a>) and sign up for an invite. I got mine in like a week or two.
It's basically like a central phone forwarding and organizing system. You get a main Google Voice number and give that out to people. You link other standard phone numbers to it. Like your cell, your landline, and your work number. When someone calls the GV number, it gets forwarded to one, all, or any combination of the linked phone numbers. You can forward your wife's calls to all your numbers, but forward certain people to just your work number. Or mark certain numbers straight to GV voicemail.
There's all sorts of stuff you can do with it. And for our Asian contingent, you can make really cheap international phone calls with it. Rates to Taiwan, HK, UK, France, and lots of other countries are $0.02/minute. Canada is $0.01/minute and Japan is $0.03/minute. You go to the GV website or use a dedicated app on your smart phone, put in the international number and which phone you want to call from, and it will connect that phone to the number you're dialing. No wonder AT&T isn't letting Apple approve the Google Voice app for the iPhone! This is going to seriously hurt the telecom industry.
Anyway, it's free so even if you don't think you're ever going to use it, you might as well sign up and grab a number now. (310) isn't available, but lots of (949), (714), (213), etc numbers are. You're going to need to associate it with a gmail account so might as well sign up for invite notification from a gmail account. Easy to create one if you don't have one already. Just thought I'd spread the word. Go grab your free lucky phone number now!
It's basically like a central phone forwarding and organizing system. You get a main Google Voice number and give that out to people. You link other standard phone numbers to it. Like your cell, your landline, and your work number. When someone calls the GV number, it gets forwarded to one, all, or any combination of the linked phone numbers. You can forward your wife's calls to all your numbers, but forward certain people to just your work number. Or mark certain numbers straight to GV voicemail.
There's all sorts of stuff you can do with it. And for our Asian contingent, you can make really cheap international phone calls with it. Rates to Taiwan, HK, UK, France, and lots of other countries are $0.02/minute. Canada is $0.01/minute and Japan is $0.03/minute. You go to the GV website or use a dedicated app on your smart phone, put in the international number and which phone you want to call from, and it will connect that phone to the number you're dialing. No wonder AT&T isn't letting Apple approve the Google Voice app for the iPhone! This is going to seriously hurt the telecom industry.
Anyway, it's free so even if you don't think you're ever going to use it, you might as well sign up and grab a number now. (310) isn't available, but lots of (949), (714), (213), etc numbers are. You're going to need to associate it with a gmail account so might as well sign up for invite notification from a gmail account. Easy to create one if you don't have one already. Just thought I'd spread the word. Go grab your free lucky phone number now!
