Google Garble

Last week I received my Google Voice invite. It's a really cool service that basically allows me to choose a personal phone number from a list of available numbers. With this new number, I can control where I receive calls, whether land line, work and/or cell. Simply tie your numbers to it, set up a contact list, and personalize where you want the calls to go.

There is a "send to voice mail" option for those annoying souls that always seem to call at the wrong time. Beautiful, right? For close family and friends, you can instruct calls to go to your work and cell. If someone leaves a message, you can listen in on the message while the person is leaving it and decide if you want to accept the call at any time during the message. Read more here.

But the COOLEST thing about Google Voice is the voice mail transcription. This cutting edge technology will send a text to your phone with a brief snippet of the voice mail, an email to your gmail account along with transcription, and also to the Google Voice account with the transcribed text and the actual recording.

I've had the number about a week only giving it to Jay, and that was simply because it came up in an email conversation. As much as I think this is the coolest thing I've seen in a while, I wasn't quite ready to send out the mass email to have everyone change my number. I was just getting my toes wet - you know - testing the water. Well, my daughter found out that Jay had my new number, so she called it tonight and left a voice mail asking me to explain why Jay had the number and she didn't. When I got the alert, this is what the transcription said:

hello apparently danny hi it's your new google order number but you're all in order to not you know i thought that was a bit of a travis he and if you gimme a call back and hopefully we can rectify that situation alright bye

When I read that I thought, 'now what kind of yay-hoo is leaving me cryptic messages on an otherwise boring Thursday evening?' When I clicked play and heard my daughter's playful voice, I fell out of my chair laughing. I laughed so hard, the dogs almost went into orbit, having never seen me laugh so hard. Here is what she really said:

SO, apparently, JAY has your new Google Voice number, but your OWN DAUGHTER does not (laughter). So, I thought that was a bit of a travesty. Give me a call back and hopefully we can rectify this situation (more laughter).

In conclusion, I highly recommend signing up for this service purely for entertainment value if nothing else. I told my daughter that whenever I'm feeling blue, I'm going to ask her to leave me a voice mail on Google Voice. Seriously, GO GET your Google Voice number!