What is Google Voice? Personal Phone Number, Custom Fowarding, Voice Mails, & Text / Transcribing

Google purchased a company called Grand Central and is turning it into something called Google Voice. It's a lot of things, but most of all, it's a revolutionary phone service for you that's free. First, you need to pick a phone number.

Once you have a number, you can do all kinds of cool things with it. For example, you can assign custom voice mail messages to individual callers or groups of callers. Like, "Thanks for Calling Bliss Technology" for business associates or "Hi, Honey, On the Airplane Until 5pm" for your wife. Also, you can get text transcriptions of voicemails sent to your phone or you can access them on the web. No, it's not perfect, but close enough!

Ultimate forwarding power. You can actually assign forwarding to specific groups. In other words, you could automatically route business accounts to specific representatives or unknown callers to the secretary.

Advanced tracking. Here at Bliss, we intend to combine Google Voice with online advertising so we have a simple way to track leads! Basically, we'll set up a custom phone number for each ad campaign and then route those calls in-house or to a designated client rep. Each call that comes in will be entered into a database (just the stats, not the content of the call). Now, THAT'S cool.