Last week Google announced that they have opened access to Google Voice for everyone in the U.S. (previously available by invite only). According to Google, “Google Voice isn’t ready for businesses and schools quite yet, but we’re exploring additional functionality for organizations.”

We will stay tuned for future updates and functionality, but this is a good opportunity to look at the pros and cons of the current free service provided by Google.

An explanation of Google Voice provided by Google.

Pros
-transcribing the voicemail to text gives you a quick glance at what the message is about and how long it is.
-sends you an instant email when you have a new message
-messages can be heard from your phone or personal computer
-allows you to make free calls and text messages to the US and Canada
-one unique phone number can ring your cell phone, home phone, and business phone

Cons
-the voicemails being transcribed to text need a lot of work… there are almost always errors that make reading the message confusing
-reading the transcript does not give you the tone of the voice message
-the email subject line includes the phone number it came from, but nobody memorizes phone numbers so you often don’t know who it is from unless you check your missed calls
-messages are downloaded to your phone before you can play them. They are stored and then sit on there until they are deleted. This gets annoying when they build up over time… (applys to Droid phones)s

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