Advantages to Using Google Voice as Your Voice Mail Provider

I have AT&T Go Phone. When someone calls me the AT&T Go Phone voice mail never picks up. What happens is that the service tells the person calling to dial the phone number that they wish to call. Then it asks them again, and again, and finally hangs up on them. Now I did attempt to call AT&T's Go Phone technical support about this issue, but I kept getting hung up on when they tried to transfer the call between the traditional AT&T customer service number to the Go Phone customer service.

So I went to the Google Voice website and entered my cell phone number. It then asked me to enter a confirmation code into my cell phone, which I did. It then provided me with another code to type into my phone. I typed that code into my cell phone and hit send, the request was processed and I recieved a message on my phone informing that calls to my cell phone would be forwarded.

When I call the number that Google Voice uses for voice mail access in my area it asks me to put in my pin number, which I set up earlier. This is a good feature to have for those times that you lose your cell phone, someone else retrieves it, and they attempt to listen to your voice mail. Another feature I like about Google Voice is that if you get an incoming message you will recieve a text message, plus a message in your Gmail account and one on the Google Voice email website telling you that you recieved a message. In addition to that, they transcribe the messages for you, in that you do not have to actually use your minutes going into your cell phone to listen to messages you do not want to act upon.

This means that I can put my phone on silent, allow Google Voice to answer the phone, and know when I have recieved a voice mail without actually having to check it. There are other features, such as the ability to call other telephone numbers from the Google Voice website, which means I do not need to have a phone to place a phone call, or the ability to send text messages to cell phones from the Internet. People can leave you a voice mail from a webpage through a widget, you can have different outgoing greetings for different phone numbers and many others.

The service is free to and from phone numbers in the United States. Google will also give you a phone number if you need one. If you are looking for additional voice mail options or functionality or just want a cool phone service to play around with Google Voice may be worth looking into.