Google Voice Now For Cell Phones

My favorite Google Voice feature is the ability to have all of my voice-mails transcribed and emailed to me. Most of the time there is about an  eighty percent accuracy, or when it stumbles I can listen to the audio directly.  For me it is a huge time saver when I am on the road or at a conference.

One of my biggest failings with Google Voice is that it was just not able to handle the voice-mail of my most common phone…my cell phone.  Well the folks at Google have done it again and that feature is now available  your cell phone  because of a a new Google Voice feature.

The way it works is that Google handles the call via the remote call forward feature, the person on the other end of the phone hears a short announcement that Google Voice is trying to locate you, then your phone greeting is played and Google intercepts the recording.  I must admit that this is pretty slick!  I used to use a service to transcribe my emails but having the power of Google – this tops my list of favorite new cloud services.

To activate, click on the settings button in your Google Voice account and if you have your cell phone defined there will be an option to activate the service on your account.  You then have to identify your phone Carrier, mine is Sprint and then you enter in a string of numbers to enable remote call forwarding.

The entire process took about 45 seconds to complete, and now I get my voice-mail transcribed and emailed to my phone. You do loose the ability to call into your Sprint voice-mail and retrieve your messages – but I have not yet encountered an issue where I needed to worry about this.