Cupfighter.net

I recently got my invitation to sign up for Google Voice (previously known as Grand Central) but was confronted with a couple of challenges. The first one being that the service is not offered outside the US yet. Since I’ve been living abroad for the last few years, I’ve gotten used to finding myself on the wrong side of the “geo-fence” that sites put up, using your IP address to determine whether you might be in the US or not. So to begin the process of responding to the invitation email, I needed to proxy my web browser traffic thru a server in the US (there are scores of anonymizing proxies and plain-old-vanilla proxies, but I’m lucky to have friends with computers with reasonably low latency ping times). Once that was done, I began the 4 step process of registering a phone number so that I could get on with finding out what GV can do.

So many choices for phone numbers, but fortunately they came up with an interesting combination of methods to choose an available number. You can search by zip or area code of course, and you can also search by text string. What better way to make your Google Voice phone number easy to remember or say to someone than to look for your favorite phrase or handle/call-name. Since physical location does not matter so much these days, why not pick a phone number that hails from “Pocahontas, Mississippi?”

The next challenge was a bit tougher, the service needs at least one phone number to ring you on when you get a call to your GV number. That number has to be a US number (due to the way calls are charged in the US versus Europe. [I found an interesting discussion about this and how it impacts the possibility of deploying GV in Europe.

With some blind optimism, I entered my US efax/j2 number, hoping that when they called it to request the two digit verification code currently displayed on my browser, they might provide an alternative method for me to verify that I own/use the phone number in question in their voicemail message. Nope.

So my options at this point were to either setup a Skype-in number for something like 15 euros for 3 months so that I could answer the automated GV phonecall, or ring a friend in the US, give his number and send him the verification code so that I could finish the registration process. You will correctly guess that I opted for the latter.

Finally I get to see the interface, check out the settings page, and read the little help buttons that explain exactly what the “do not disturb” checkbox does (this is something that I need to use of course, so that my friend does not get called each time I receive a call to my GV number). I have to say that there are only a few advantages to using Google Voice as an expat over simpler services like efax/j2. One of them, however, is pretty darn helpful. Voicemail transcripts. Although the technology still  has a ways to go before being 100% (most speech to text systems fail to get near 100% really, so who can blame them at this point), you certainly can get the gist of a message by reading the transcript. The transcribed words that the system is sure about are in black text, and the words which the system had doubts about are in a lighter shade of grey. And just like a karaoke machine, the highlighting of the message text in red underline as you listen to the audio voicemail message is kind of fun in it’s own right. What I’m not entirely sure about though is how or why the transcript engine/system decides that a transcript is not possible. The first GV voicemail message that I left for myself was marked “Transcript not available.”

Being the responsible beta user that I am, I immediately clicked on the feedback link to let them know of my question about the criteria under which a transcript might not be available. This took me to a nice little Google docs form for providing feedback. Ok, I’m game. A simple email form is not enough control over what folks put into the feedback, so I write up my question, I hit submit and get a cheeky little reply saying that an unexpected error occurred, they are rather embarassed about it of course, and that I can rest assured that geeks have been notified that the error took place. So much for my first interaction with the community of GV developers.

One more thing worth mentioning is the GV mobile application. Having a blackberry (or iPhone) means that I can (and did) download the GV mobile application, giving me the equivalent of visual voicemail for free on the service. This is nice. Of course if I want to listen to the voicemails, I need to download them first, but that is to be expected. The real time saving feature here is not necessarily being able to listen to my GV messages whereever I happen to be, but instead the sheer time saved by being able to see who the message is from and read the transcription in just a few seconds.

Oh and I suppose being able to send and receive SMS/text messages for free with my friends and family in the US is also a perk. They intend, I supposed, to eat some of Skype’s lunch in this kind of “messaging for free” model. I wonder if they plan to have an API exposed so that I can do this with a script? I admit that I’m not the real target audience subscriber for Google Voice, but I’m on board at the moment and am thinking that it has some nifty features (I didn’t even mention the widgets/gadgets that you can use where the person never knows what your GV number is… nice for security/anonymity).

Question: Anyone else trying to integrate GV into their point of presence without being in the US at the time?