The Google Voice dust has settled now. The service, initially billed as revolutionary, may be proving more experimental than anything. Today's announcement of a standalone Google Voicemail feature softened some of my misgivings with the original Google Voice offering, but I'm still not willing to send out an e-mail to everyone I know announcing that I've changed my mobile number.
Like everyone else on the planet, I believed the hype when Google announced Google Voice. At the time, I was using a feature phone and saw Google's promised service as a way of expanding on the limited features offered by my phone. Like everyone else, I waited patiently for months until the rollout actually happened. And when the first invitations were sent out, I was frustrated when I had to wait another 72 hours before mine arrived.
However, the defining GV moment for me was the realization that I'd need to change my number. Regardless of the long list of neato features – call forwarding, "free" voice calls (that still use your precious minutes), SMS, "Listen-in," individualized messages for all your contacts, visual voicemail – changing my legacy number that I've had for years felt like it was more trouble than it was worth.
In the end, I opted to send just a few of my friends the Google Voice number and see how the service worked. Let's just say it turned out to be more complicated than I'd imagined and not nearly as life-changing as I'd believed it would be.
The problems I saw ranged from messages that cut off because of the number of rings I had set up for my voicemail with my carrier to a speech-to-text feature that came out the other end looking like a foreign language. For instance, I received the following message from my wife via Google Voice:
Help and I was com here and I just, it said that there please state your name and I'll try and reach you. So they haven't. Okay love you bye.
You'd never know by reading that message that my wife speaks perfect English with excellent enunciation. Needless to say, I was not impressed by Google Voice and have since moved on.
Fast forward to Google's announcement today that it had launched a standalone voicemail product that would not require me to change my number. Curious, I activated my mobile phone (now using an iPhone 3GS) from my Google Voice account for the free voicemail feature and waited to be wowed – waited to be convinced that this was something I needed, something the iPhone doesn't already offer.
The personalized messages for my contacts worked the same way they had the first time I tried Google Voice. The visual voicemail feature was still just as awful. However, the worst part is that without a Google Voice app on the iPhone, I had to go through the pain of launching a browser to listen to my messages. Not only does such a laborious process test my patience, it also taxes the precious little battery life of my iPhone.
Maybe Google Voice is a game-changer for those Android and BlackBerry users out there who are allowed an app for listening to their messages. I haven't reviewed GV on those devices.
However, as an iPhone user, I am quite satisfied with the way my native voicemail works. Until Google Voice's speech-to-text function is decipherable, I can't see any reason an iPhone user would find a need for such a complex and ultimately frustrating service.
Finally, the whole thing makes me wonder why Apple made such a fuss over the Google Voice app. The only thing I can figure is that Apple will be including native functionality of GV-type features on future devices, or through a software update, and doesn't want existing competition getting in the way. But was it really worth the legions of loyal customers that Apple angered by rejecting/holding the Google Voice app from the App Store?