Google Voice is Finally Open to the Public: 5 Simple Steps for Account Setup

Google first acquired a phone management company called GrandCentral back in July of 2007. In March of last year they changed the service name to “Google Voice” and it recently became available to the public.

Google Voice is a free phone service with the exception of international calls. It allows customers to register one number to ring them anywhere and get transcribed messages to their email inbox. Plus, the sign-up process is surprisingly simple considering the complexity of what’s going on behind the scenes.

Based on my own experience, I’ve outlined a  simple 5-step guide to follow for account setup:

1) Visit google.com/voice

2) Sign in with your Google account log-in and password

3) Choose a single phone number to have your calls forwarded to (you can use your existing phone number if you prefer)

4) Enter your current phone number so Google can call that phone and send you a 2-digit verification code

5) Enter the 2-digit verification code you receive to verify it’s the correct number

This might seem like a lot of steps to take but it took me less than ten minutes to set up my Google Voice account for my home and mobile phone numbers. Google guides you through the process so you understand why they’re having you do any particular step. I spent an additional half hour or so going through the various features and settings and getting things working to my specifications.

What benefits does Google Voice actually offer?

Check out their answers  in the brief video below. If you’re still curious, you can also view individual videos for the most popular Google Voice Features.

Google Voice can help someone that works directly with clients by giving out one phone number and assign various contacts to different groups. For example, you might have a group of contacts for your co-workers, clients, friends and/or family. Each group would be able to have a different set of phones to ring at various times, a different voicemail message and the option for a call to go directly to voicemail (which is a nice feature to have for a “blacklist” group).

There was a moment of controversy when Google tried to submit their Google Voice app to Apple so that iPhone users could use the service. Apple ended up rejecting the application’s submission to its App Store. This led people to believe that AT&T had some part in making that decision, while others claimed that Apple was trying to impede on Google’s growing user base. Nobody is certain as to who made the final decision to approve the application or not, but Google knew that they needed to make this service available to iPhone users.

Google ended up writing the phone application so it could be accessed through a Web browser. iPhone users can now access their web service by going to google.com/voice and they are given access to all of the features that they’d expect from the native application that Apple rejected. There’s no way to block access to this due to the fact that it’s just a website and Apple can’t block Internet content under their existing terms of service (there would be an absolutely massive opposition if they were to start filtering users’ Internet access). What makes this so great is that Google programmed their Website design to make it look and act like a native iPhone application would.

My suggestion? Check this out. Even if you decide not to use this service, you’ll be ahead of the trend.