Google Voice invites?

[HunterGather]

Seeing as how the google Wave was a flop, what about google voice?

Anyone got any invites?
I signed up and it said i will get one in the near future. I can't be bothered to wait for the future unless one of y'alls has an invite to spare.

https://www.google.com/voice

[JClemy]

Google voice sounds real cool. I think Wave might get good? Maybe? I can't get excited for google again. I prefer to be excited when I see it and have cautious optimism.

[menikmati]

I have some google voice invites, but I think I have to save em for a few people right now (only have 3 at the moment)....Google Voice is pretty damn cool though I have to say.

[malcolmjamalawesome]

Anyone care to explain Google Voice so as to save me the ... Googling?

[Blinken]

I would love an invite as well if anyone has one to spare

[HunterGather]

Anyone care to explain Google Voice so as to save me the ... Googling?

http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

There are 2 short clips explaining what its all about.
I can't be bothered to embed the videos here.

[menikmati]

It's basically a phone forwarding service...you select a number, and when people call that number, it will call whatever phone (home, cell) that you forward that number too, but it will also alert and keep track of everything online too. You have a control panel you log into that looks sorta like Gmail...you can manage your inbox, history, voice mails and such. When someone leaves you a voicemail on your new number, it saves it online and you can play it back in the browser, you can also choose to listen into the voice mail live as the person is saying it. You can also text for free, and set custom voice mails for separate numbers. I like it.

[HunterGather]

TL;DR

[shakermaker113]

the only problem I see is the power google is going to have over me when all my data is stored in free google apps.

[sonofhal]

Yes, because what would you do if you lost your voicemail history? Your world would be over. No coming back from that.

[shakermaker113]

I'm not talking about just voicemail, but with the current trend of email, docs, voicemail, calendar, notes, waves, and who knows what else in the future (mp3 collection?) I'm going to become pretty dependent on them pretty fast.

[tessalasset]

google number sounds badass.

[HunterGather]

The aspect of ringing multiple #s doesn't do much for me, as I just have my celly.
But the voicemail and all that good stuff sounds cool.

But its not exactly something new.
I had a free service called YouMail or something like that, and my voicemails were forwarded to my email so i can listen to, as well as the messages were transcribed.

[shakermaker113]

I got my invite and started using it.

the voicemail transcription is kinda shitty. when I got a message from comcast about my account, it tried to translate the spanish parts as if they were english. that was funny.

even when I got a real voicemail, it still got maybe a 15% sucess rate. and put together weird stuff like "I'll talk to you a call when you can see anything inside but that's not the best time to call me, unified. I'm excited, and if if we could and I hit a class and for the weekend."

I'm sure it will get better with time. to their credit, they know which parts of the message they got wrong. the text is colored in grey vs black based on their confidence.

[Mickjagger00]

it didnt work for me

[tessalasset]

i started a website which i probably won't do much with but it's a funny quick read:

http://googlevoicesucks.blogspot.com


i had to take off the voicemail option finally last night. 1 - i hated the translations. they were so bad that almost always i would have to listen to the voicemail anyways after. but 2 - i missed being able to save real voicemails to my phone. i don't like that they're just sitting on a computer now. i have about five voicemails saved from my now-deceased grandmother singing to me and wishing me happy birthday and whatnot over the years, and i would hate to not have those on my phone anymore. i just hated the voicemail feature i guess. i probably wont use it ever again.

[shakermaker113]

you can save your voicemails on your phone longer than you can save them online?

[ELECtROjan]

ed do u have any invites? Im setting up a company and am thinking of using this

[tessalasset]

i just dont like the idea of my voicemails sitting on a website somewhere. i'd rather just keep a few good ones on my phone.

[ELECtROjan]

friend at Apple just sent me an invite. So far so good.

[shakermaker113]

i just dont like the idea of my voicemails sitting on a website somewhere. i'd rather just keep a few good ones on my phone.

I wasn't aware of phones that actually stored voicemails. most seem to access them remotely. and the difference between having a voicemail on your phone provider's voice mail server and google's web server is, effectively, nothing.