Google Voice Goes Live

to me, as always, is senior writer Jonathan Strickland. Hey there, all right, So, uh, I like your voice. You seem to be in good voice today. Are you coming onto me? No? Alright? Good? Um, Yeah, my voice is all right today. And uh and your your voice is always is smooth and enjoyable like my coffee? Are you coming on to me a little bit? So, anyway, we thought with this wonderful segue, we just go right into talking about a fairly new product, at least you know,

new to us, Google Voice. Yeah, it's a it's not really new, no, because it's it's actually an evolution of an older product, which I guess we can start with yeah, I think we should because I have to freely admit my embarrassment. See a few years ago, UM, there was this company called grand Central, and UH it was. It was a really cool new idea for basically routing all of your calls UH through one number to multiple numbers, so your home phone, your cell phone, your work phone,

all through one UH phone number. And I actually got an invitation to this closed beta and never acted on it. And then then Google decides to acquire this property. And then, of course, the way Google does with everything, it kind of sits on it closes it off to everyone else while it starts to fiddle with it. And until recently,

that was the way things were. If if you were an existing Grand Central customer, you could continue to use it, but if you weren't, then you had to just sit around and wait and hope that Google would open it up again. And that's kind of where we are now. Google has started to open it up. It's still not wide open for the general public as of the recording

of this podcast at any rate. You have to have an invite to get into it, but you can just request and invite and eventually they'll get around to you. Both Chris and yours. Truly, we've we've requested and invite and and we have it. So we've been playing with it for a little while. Yeah, they didn't even send me a snarky note like, well, you didn't use the last and we gave you, so what makes you think you're gonna use this one? So thanks Google for not

rubbing it in that nice Yeah. So, the idea here is that instead of a phone number going to a specific phone or specific device, the phone number goes to a specific person, so you can port that number wherever you may go from now until you shuffle off. The mortal co will essentially. Uh. The idea here being that you don't have to worry about giving out someone your work number and your mobile phone number and your home number, and say, hey, if you can't reach me here, try

this one. If you can't, if I'm not there, try this one. You give them this one number, and then you have the control to say which phones ring at what times and for which people. Yep, and uh, it's it's got some really nifty applications to whereas you know some of the things you can do with it. It's it's pretty cool. The let's Let's let's kind of give an example to sort of break into it. So let's say that you have three phones. You put your home phone,

your mobile phone, and your work phone right all right. Now, what you would do is, once you receive the invite to join Google Voice, you would go in and you would first put in your area code and try and find a phone number for you. That would be your Google Voice number, And this is the number you would give out to other people. The one number you would give out. You wouldn't have to give out any other

phone numbers to anyone else period. So you you put in your area code, you choose whatever phone number you you know is up there. You can try different combinations. You could even see if you can find a combination that corresponds to a word. Yeah. You can search by word, which is really nice. Yeah. So you know, if you always want to, you know, your your phone number to spell something out, you can see if that was available. Now,

of course, it's not going to be available everywhere. Not every word is going to be available, and of course they have to have the right number of letters or else it doesn't work. But uh, once you get that, then what Google will do is it'll it'll call you and ask you to put in a confirmation code, a two digit confirmation code two say yes, this is in fact my phone, this is my account. Once you do that,

you're set. You're ready to go. You can start setting things up and telling it which phone numbers, UM correspond with your Google Voice account. Yeah, one of the other other things. Before we get too much further, UM, just like to point out that you can also choose area codes. So if you want to be someplace across the country, me, you can put in a Californian code and go, oh, yeah, I'm in l am working on my next movie. Yeah, and you can totally do that as long as the

numbers available, right, Yeah, that is true. You don't necessarily have to choose an area code that does correspond with your specific location. If you want to be one of those people who you know, let's call long distance, right or yeah you know, or or you or you are, say an aspiring screenwriter, and you don't want people to know you're not actually in l A. Uh. There are reasons I can think of why you would want to

mask your zip zip code, your area code. And uh, so let's say you've got these three phone numbers that you've entered into your account. Now, just if you just had it where it would ring for all three when everyone called you, That's exactly what would happen. Someone would call your phone number, your Google Voice phone number, and all three of those phones would start to ring, and then whichever phone you picked up first, that's the that's where the call would be rounded through. Oh, I was

just going to say that. One of the cool things about this is say you've answered the call on your home phone and you realize that you, uh, we're gonna head out for an errand, and you went, oh, man, I wish I had answered my cell phone and said you can actually transfer the call. That's true while you're in the middle of it between different different lines, which I think is pretty awesome. You just hit the star

button and Google Voice will call you on your other phones. Meanwhile, the phone at your desk is ringing at work, and uh, you pick up your cell phone extension and there's your conversation. You can hang up your your home phone right and just walk out the door, no interruption whatsoever. That is a really cool feature. The other cool one is that, or actually there's several, but another cool one is that

you can tell your through your Google account. You can tell it which phones you want to ring for specific callers. So let's say it's your family and you wanted to reach you, no matter what, you can tell him, all right, make all three phones ring. But let's say that it's someone at your job and you don't want to necessarily I have your cell phone or your home phone ringing every single time this person calls you. You can designate

so it only rings on your office phone, yep. And you can also block calls from certain people if you want to. It's very easy to do that. You can either send it well really, you just send it straight to boysmail, so you know, you never have to deal with that annoying uncle who calls you in the middle of the night to ask what was the name of that movie that you know he really wanted on DVD for Christmas but you forgot. I'm just speaking from personal experience,

all right. So look, look, look, some of us just can't bring ourselves to purchase Uncle Buck. That's all I'm saying. So moving on the but yeah, and you can also say it for for certain times, like saying, you know, between the hours of nine am and five pm, my office phone will ring, but my home phone own and cell phone won't. That's a very nice feature, right, Uh. And then after five pm, just my cell phone and home phone, and maybe after you know, ten pm, none

of my phones will ring. Yeah, you can said do not disturb, so that you're all the all the calls go straight to voicemail and you don't have to worry about it waking you up in the middle of the night. And uh, which is nice, you know. Sorry, go ahead. I was going to talk about. Another cool feature regard to voicemail is that you can actually listen into voicemail messages, a feature which I have not successfully gotten to work,

but I've been playing with it for a few days. Um. But you should be able to press three and um after a call has gone to voicemail and listen in and you go, oh wait, I need to take this call. You can answer the phone. You can actually pick it up like you would if you were listening on your old style answering machine. And this person I'm okay with, yes, yes, exactly. Yeah.

You might. You might see that a call is coming in from someone you thinking, well, I don't know that I could really take this call right now, you let it go to voicemail, you use the listening feature, which I believe is actually trademarked. Uh. You use the listening feature and you realize, wait, this is a really important call. I do need to take this. You press the star button. There you go. Um. Or you can just let it go to voicemail and you hang up and you say,

I'll deal with that later. It's not important right now. Um. It really gives you a lot of control. The thing that I like about Google Voice when I first started using it is that it's, uh, the layout on the website is a lot like Gmail almost. Yeah. In fact, I would not be surprised if we see Google Voice

in Gmail integration in the foreseeable future. And I can think of some reasons why, but we'll get to that in a minute, right, But at any rate, So, the nice thing is it's familiar for anyone who's used Gmail or any of really any of the Google apps, because Google Docs does have a kind of similar look as well. Um exactly. So it's it's not a brand new interface. It's going to take you a while too, uh to learn. It's actually very intuitive. And here's another cool feature. There's

an automatic transcription feature. That's one of the things that I think would help it integrate with Gmail. Yes easily. Yes, So someone calls you, they leave a voicemail if they if they're calling through your Google Voice number, it's going to your Google Voice voicemail and Google Voice will try to transcribe this message and you'll be able to read it through your Google Voice account. You won't have to listen to it, which can be very helpful. But there

are a couple of caveats. Yes, the voice recognition software is not perfect. Right if someone is not speaking clearly, if they have a very heavy accent, if they're not speaking English, if there's a lot of noise in the background, it may not be able to transcribe the speech accurately. And if it detects that there's enough of a inner parence there, if it can't easily transcribe the the voice to text, it will actually send you a message saying

that it was unable to transcribe. You'll still have the recording, you just won't have the transcription. Um And I've heard of people having difficulties with certain words. Uh I used her as an example all the time on here. I was listening to episodes recently, and I realized how often I've mentioned her, But it's because I know a lot about the kind of issue she's had with this. But Natalie del Conti of sen It, No, she has never

seen a successful transcription of her name. It comes across as Daddy or Maddie or Madeleine or you know, but not Natalie, which is not an uncommon name. But so yeah, you have certain words and and certain dialects may give the transcription software a little bit of a problem. I actually tried the transcription UH featured by accidents sort of. I was trying to call actually I was trying to

get the listen into work, and UH. As I was doing that, I was leaving myself a voicemail message, and when I hung up, suddenly I got a text message from from Google Voice with the transcription of my call, which was basically, I wonder if I can't get this thing to work, And it was verbatim exactly what I had said, or at least what I remember I had said. And then I checked my Gmail and there was another

transcription of it there, So there you go. I guess the nice thing is it's automatic, so you're not thinking, Wow, some human being somewhere had to listen to this incredibly inane thing I just said and then write it down and then email me with it. That's a job that you don't stay in very long. So I jeez, here's another one of those. Get the milk and the bread,

you idiot, got it. I'm actually glad that I can't hear my own voicemails that I've sent to other people, because by the time I hang up, I realized, you know, I could have left that same message and in half the number of sentences, at at the most half than the ones I actually used. And then I feel like a complete idiot. Yeah, you should hear the podcast before they're edited down. Yeah, they are like four and a half hours long. Peter Jackson is an executive producer of

our podcasts. By the way, that is not true, so Mr Jackson, please don't come after me. Another cool feature though, Uh we're talking about transcriptions and we're talking about the voicemail. You can record phone calls. Yes, you have a voice, so if something. But here's the trick. You can only you can only record incoming phone calls. You can't call out and then record using Google Voice. They the person has to call you on your Google Voice number and

then you can activate the the record call function. And because recording calls is kind of a sticky issue legal issue in several states and countries, Google Voice has an automatic uh audio clue that the call is now being recorded, and I think it actually says the call is now being recorded, so that way the person on the other end of the phone doesn't, you know, say something incredibly incriminating and then it's recorded for all time. I assume

it transcribes the recordings as well, though I haven't. You haven't checked that yet. It would be incredibly useful for people such as journalists because occasionally we have to call and and do a phone interview and uh we often you know, of course, we have to record those so that we have a copy of it, and then we have to transcribe it, and the whole process can be very time consuming. To boil that down into a program where it will record it and transcribe it all automatically,

is uh, that's just very enticing to me. You can even download the voice recording, yes, so that if you were a journalist, uh and needed to save a copy for archival purposes. You could you know, conduct your phone interview and then download a copy and you know, put it place, or you know, you could leave it on Google because you probably have a you know, pet a bite now of storage servers already, So that's pretty cool.

I I did send a message because there's one of the neat things about Google Voice right now in the early stages is, uh, if you if you really hunt around at the different features, it'll tell you what's supported and what isn't and if it's not supported. It gives you a little button where you can say, hey, send us feedback if you want this option, let us know. And if enough people say, hey, we really could use this option, that will will prioritize that we'll try and

implement it. So of course I did that for the outgoing calls. If you were to make a call from Google Voice, and you might wonder, well, how do how do you make a call from Google Voice if it's not tied to a device, Chris could tell you because he's done it. Yeah, actually, um there is a button on the main Google Voice page and it says you know that you can make a call, and you go, oh, well, that's kind of cool. I can use v I P to make a phone call. Well no, not exactly. What

you need is one of your Google Voice phones. Uh, and then you can initiate the call from the website. And basically it's Uh, it's kind of weird because what it does is it dials both the recipients phone and your Google Voice enabled phone at the same time. And then when the two of you pick up, you're on the phone call, but the computer. You're not actually talking through the computer. No, it's kind of like an operator the operator. First, first, the operator dials you, your phone

starts to ring, you pick it up immediately. Then the the it starts to dial whoever you were trying to call, and then they pick up, and now you're connected through Google Voice. And the person who receives the call should see the your Google Voice number on their color I D as opposed to your cell phone's number or your office phone number. That's what they should see. Well yeah, yeah,

and that's the point of doing this. The reason why you would want to initiate the call from your computer rather than from your phone is because it actually uses the on the caller idea. It actually uses your Google Voice phone number. If you call from your regular phone. Suddenly your recipient may be surprised to go, wait a minute, that's not the number I have for them. Um. And you can actually do that yourself on the Google phone. Say you're out, uh, not your Google phone, your Google

Voice enabled phone. Two entirely different well, not always two, usually entirely different things. Exactly. If you happen to be out and about and want to make a call on your cell phone and want it to appear with your Google Voice number, you dial your own Google Voice number and it recognizes you as you you know, you have to put in your pin and then when you do that, then you um, you know, it says basically, who do

you want to call? And it uses that to transcribe the number through the Google Voice system, and you know, when you call already shows up, it will be from Google Voice and not from your cell phone number or your work phone or your home phone or whatever. Um. So that that's how that works, And that's kind of important to know, because otherwise people are gonna say, you know, I've got sixteen different numbers for you, which one of them are supposed to be using, which defeats the point.

SMS is kind of the same way. You can send an SMS message from Google Voice and uh, basically it's going to put your your Google Voice number on it. But when a return message comes back, if the the recipient replies, it's going to have a weird Google Voice ish phone number attached to it, a strange number that you've never seen, even though this may be somebody you know, for example, spouse speaking from personal experience, you know, and

wait a minute, that's not her number. Well, as it turns out, you need to add that number to your uh, to your contacts information for that person, and then it will show up as the right person. But that's another

weird transcription thing. And I actually got that from life Hacker, which has a totally um, a very a good uh introduction to how to use Google Voice, and it's you know, written in the life Hacker style, which like, if you really are going to use this service, you need to tell people call you with this number, don't give them any other numbers. You know, you've got to You've got to embrace it or it's not gonna work. Create business cards and this is the only number on it. Exactly

kind of thing. Yeah, if you were to call someone with Google Voice the first time you call them you've never called them before on this number, assuming they have the option turned on, because they can turn it off.

You will encounter the call screening process and it asks you for your name, and if you you say your name, and that way the person receiving the call when when you call, they'll when you first start to try and pick up a Google voice call, you actually have to go through a series of pressing buttons to do it right. It's not just pick up the phone, so it'll say,

it'll actually give the voice that you use. He'll say, if I were to call, you say phone call from Jonathan Strickland, unless of course I wasn't paying attention, in which case I'll be starting my message. I'm like, hey, there, how's it going. Listen? I wanted to bleep, and they're like, oh, that's an idiot Jonathan Strickland and uh, but that's how it identifies the call, and from there on out, that's the recording that's going to use to identify that person,

unless you can change it down the line. If you're tired of hearing everyone start a voicemail message instead of saying their name, which is apparently that happens a lot because we're all kind of trained. We hear that beap, we just go into message mode. We don't necessarily think, oh, wait, I was just supposed to say my name. Um, I had that problem with bells. You ring a bell and

I salivate, Yeah, alright, Pavlov. So the that's the that will happen the first time anyone tries to call that number if they're not in your context list already, and then um, that can kind of throw you off a little bit. I think I know that there are some people who use Google Voice who talk about how that no one has ever just said their name. In my defense, the one time I did it, I was on a very noisy showroom floor at E three, and I couldn't hear what the recording was asking me to do, so

I thought I was leaving a voicemail message. Yeah, the tech savvy guy who who um, golly, what else can we say about Google Voice. I think it's gonna just get further tight into other Google apps. I mean, we're gonna see things like this kind of loop into the Google Chrome operating system that was announced not too long ago. It's already got Google for one one in it yep. So I mean it's it's pretty much going to Uh it's just another step of Google trying to take over

the entire world. Yep. And uh, if you think that it's completely unique, you'd be wrong. They actually have some competitors, the biggest one that I've seen being tell Centrists. It has a an act called vox ox Um, which now is vox ox too. They have a brand new version out or coming out um, and it offers many the same services, except it's got a few more that I specifically searched for and got that box that you were talking about if peopould like to see this functionality added

for Google Voice. So in some ways voxox has some of the other stuff going on that you might not see. I mean, it's already got you know, the voice number, um, you know, text messaging, I am. It's also got video conferencing, the ability to facts, uh, file sharing, and social network integration. So I would not be a bit surprised to see Google Voice adding a lot of new features, probably over the next twelve to eighteen months, and you know, opening

up to more and more and more people. You know, and since you've already got a Google account, maybe even seven of them. Uh, you you probably, I mean, all you'll have to do is basically tell it. Let you know, log in your account, say yeah, I'd like to be notified when this is available, and they'll just add you right in and it integrates with everything else. I can think of one other feature that I wanted to mention

before we sign off on this. Okay, the widgets. The widgets. Yeah, you can actually add a Google Voice widget to a website. So let's say you're building a website and you want people to be able to contact you. Uh, you can set you can create a widget on your website a little bit the icon. People click on it and they can call you using that widget and send you messages through Google Voice. I can't imagine setting that up because I don't like the idea of slogging through page after

page after page of voicemails. But then I think you and I have a slightly higher visibility than the average Google Voice user. That's probably true that you know. Then again, once you're compared to other people, but you well, even so, I mean, it all depends on how many people go to that website. Lots of people go to our website.

On the other hand, you know, this is just off the cuff here, but you could theoretically set up a Google Voice number just leave it on do not disturb, and let people leave you voice messages, you know, rather than using a telephone number, and then you could just check it. Just check the transcriptions. You don't even have to listen to them, yeah, unless they have a very strong accent. I think I think we've got a way of putting in song requests, not that we can play them,

but you make the request. So and so is requested that we play such and such. Well, just I'm gonna tell you what I tell everybody. We can't afford the rights. Moving on. Yeah, great, well that's uh, that's all the Google Voice stuff I have right now. Remember if you don't, if you go to Google Voice and it says that you need an invite, you just click on that little button and put in your email address and you will

receive an invite Eventually. We both put in the request, not that long ago, or I think you put it in before I did it, but we both got the the invitation pretty much the same day. Yeah. Yeah, And there have been reports that Google was reserving large blocks of phone numbers, which makes sense because that's what they would need to do. Just you know, it's a little handy thing. This is one of those things that stuff

like Gmail makes possible. Switching carriers. It's gonna be a lot easier to because I've I've had services where I wanted to change, you know, Oh, well that v O I P services you know, thirty dollars a month cheaper than what I'm paying now. Like, oh, we can port your phone number, but it's gonna take you know, eight to four fifty three weeks, right, Well, I really want you know, when we can set you up with a brand new phone number. Well, Google Voice, you could just

add that new phone number and say who cares? Yeah, if you or if you just move, like exactly for those of us who still have a landline, that wouldn't be me. Yeah, I just have a cell phone and my work phone. But if I were to still have a home phone, you know, tethered to my house, and then I were to move, well I wouldn't necessarily be able to keep that phone number, depending on how far

away I moved. That's true. In some places they restrict you to the to the prefix the first three digits so if you were even moving in the same metropolitan area, they may say, well, you can't keep your phone number because you know you're moving two blocks away. Yeah. So in that case, a Google Voice number will be very handy because you wouldn't have to let everyone know, Hey, now you have to change all your address books because

my new phone number is blah blah blah. Um. If your Google Voice number would stay yours until you know, essentially until I guess forever, until Google folds, or until maybe maybe they'll wait two d years and say, all right, he's probably dead by now, let's go ahead and give that number to someone else. Um. So yeah, I mean that's all I've got to all right, are you all all googled out? Well, that brings us to a time I like to call. Let's thank our sponsor. Oh yes,

our sponsor would be audible dot com. It's awesome. They have over sixty titles in audio now. And it's not just books, it's also podcasts and magazines, all sorts of stuff. And uh, some of your favorite books, i'd wager are up there in audio format, and some of them are read by the authors themselves. We each have a little suggestion for you for your next audible dot Com purchase, and if you register through the website, we'll be giving you in in a second you can get your first download

for free. That sounds awesome. Yeah, so what's your suggestion? Well, I I picked two. Um. I think maybe an appropriate one for this podcast would be What Would Google Do? By Jarvis Um. Yeah, and that is another one of the books that is actually read by the author himself. So excellent, awesome, all about Google? So that did you say you had to? I do have too, But you know that was just in case you went first and you picked mine. Oh no, mine has nothing to do

with Google. Really, Yeah, okay, mine has to do with a book I read on the flight home yesterday series back to Atlanta yesterday, And uh, I read a very simple book. But I've already seen the movie and I definitely wanted to read the book. Neil Gaiman's Coraline may have two different versions of it up on audible dot Com, including the one that Gaman himself narrated. Awesome, So that's my recommendation. It is different from the movie. So if you saw the movie and you thought, well, I've already

seen that story, the book version is different. So there you go. Excellent. So what's your second one? I'm curious to hear now. I was actually going to use a planet Google, which is a subtitle is one Company's audacious plan to organize everything we know by Randall Strauss. Does sound audacious depending on how you pronounce it. So if any of those three books as your first free download, you can go to www Dot audible podcast dot com slash tech stuff. That's www. Dot audible podcast dot com

slash tech Stuff first downloads free. Thank you audible dot com. Thank you very much, And that brings us around to our favorite segment of all time. Yes, yes, listener mail ah, yess I didn't yell at at this time, I did, thank you. This comes from Matthew from Seattle. In your Computers of the Future podcast, you mentioned the quantum physics principle that when you observe something, you change its behavior. You didn't mention, however, that that principle has a name.

The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is named after Werner Heisenberg, who won the nineteen thirty two Nobel Prize in physics for the creation of quantum mechanics. The principle basically states that a particle's position and velocity cannot be measured simultaneously with any degree of accuracy, and that the more precisely measure one,

the less precisely you can measure the other one. Also, I wanted to say that your description of quantum mechanics was extremely good, in that I believe that anyone could understand it as far as you describe, because we only describe the very beginning. I agree with you both that the finer points of quantum theory are complicated and brain busting. Thank you for your informative podcast. When I began listening, I wasn't sure whether I would enjoy it because I

am not well versed in technology jargon. However, I have found that it is incredibly easy to listen and learn from you guys. I really appreciate all the sci fi references. You guys have the best jokes, no matter what the other podcasters say about your punts and stick it in your face. That was that was from us, not from Matthew in your face. And Atthew is far more polite. Yes, indeed, you know actually had to tell you the truth before we did any research on that. I thought quantum mechanics

were very tiny people who worked on your car. Yeah, it turns out not so much. I was very disappointed because I think my car has y know, coorns in it, and I don't know how to get rid of them. It runs on magic, it does. If any of you have anything you'd like to say to us, you can email us. Because we don't have a Google Voice widget yet, email us at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com.

If you want to learn more about Google and the ways it's going to organize your life for you, you can check that out at how stuff works dot com and Chris and I will talk to you again really soon. For moralness and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to check out the new tech stuff blog now on the house stuff Works homepage, brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you