What, you don’t get geeky Lord of the Rings references?
Fine.
Anyway, of late my phone use has become a bit complicated; my office phone for my main job with my org, cell phone for personal and consulting and VOIP for consulting has made me a bit phone crazy. I needed a way to quickly sort out the calls from friends and family as well as consulting business contacts. Fortunately I have been using Google Voice for quite some time and it is a quick and easy solution to my problem.
When I first began using Google Voice the only phone I had was my cell phone and I didn’t want to share my personal number with business contacts. At the same time I wanted faculty to be able to reach me when I was on the road. Google Voice gave me a number to share that I could have ring to my cell phone. Problem solved.
These days, Google Voice isn’t just a number you can use to have people find you, it provides you pretty much everything you need and then some. For example, let’s say you want your child to be able to reach you after 8:00, but no one else. You can set Google Voice so only your child’s number will ring through, any other calls will go to voicemail. Or perhaps you want all of your phones to ring, or your phones to ring in a certain order. Google Voice can do that too.
Google Voice offers visual voicemail, phone call recording (with an appropriate warning,) text messaging (and archiving,) along with a variety of other services. Google Voice also has apps for numerous types of cellphones. If you use the Google Voice app you can save a lot of minutes on your cell phone.
The only current limitation of Google Voice is that it cannot be forwarded to extensions. I think Google may be exploring this option because it did a survey on whether people want to be able to forward Google Voice calls to an extension.
Currently I use my Google Voice number to ring both my cell phone and my VOIP service at home. I still use my actual cell phone number as a personal contact. Of course my organization line I only use for my organization’s business so I don’t use Google Voice for that. I couldn’t anyway though, since that is the line with an extension.
I highly recommend looking into Google Voice. You might just find it convenient.