It is very likely that I hate voice mail more than any other person on the planet. Having to call up the service and punch in numbers to make a selection makes me feel like I’m back in the early days of the Internet connecting to a BBS to look for tips on Space Quest 2, but instead of being the early 90′s it is actually 2010. No thanks.
After avoiding setting up voice mail on my droid for the first six months of ownership, it eventually set up itself (curses!) and I’d racked up a healthy collection of messages since May. Finally getting around to checking them, I figured I’d do some searching to see any one has solved the “voice mail problem”. Lo and behold, Google has.
To set it up on my personal phone, all I needed to create an account and call a number it gave me. Then after, Google Voice was my default voice mail. The primary reason I’ve enjoyed it so far is that upon receiving a new message, I get an email with a transcript of the message, a link to my Google Voice account, and since I use GMail, a widget that lets me play the message directly from email. I was so thrilled to not hate my voice mail that I even set up a custom message from the Old Spice guy.
I can’t speak for other phones, but on the Droid there is a mini version of Voice that lets me browse the transcript and play the messages directly.
It has a decent number of features that I don’t see myself using at the moment, but others might benefit from them. You can set up the same voice mail for multiple phones. You can set up different greetings depending who the caller is. (One to your friends, one to your family, one to your coworkers).
Anyway, figured I’d pass it along.
I’ve actually been thinking of setting up Google Voice (and the Old Spice guy’s custom message) so this was pretty useful. I might go finally do that!
I’ll add that Google Voice works well on the iPhone these days. I’ve got an old 3G and it interfaces seamlessly with incoming/outgoing calls, SMS messages and voicemail.