Google Voice is AwesomeI still have a dumb Samsung flip phone from 2008. I'm on a family plan with my dad, so my phone only costs an additional $10 per month. However, I pay 20 cents per text sent or received. This is fine because people text me infrequently, and if I think the conversation will go back and forth, I just call them back. A standard 60-cent conversation might go: "Hey, want to go rock climbing at 3?" "Sure!" "Okay, see you then!" These happen infrequently enough that paying per text is worth it. However, nowadays, almost everyone has purchased texting plans of some sort, and they expect you to have one, too. If you give someone your number, they'll assume that you have a texting plan and have no qualms about texting you. However, in my case, it costs me 20 cents per text. I sometimes tell people not to text me, but inevitably people forget or I meet new people who don't know about my phone plan. I don't know why it took me so long to realize this, but Google Voice is the perfect solution. I finally signed up for a Google Voice number two weeks ago. It allows me to send and receive texts for free. It seems that people are better about responding to texts than to emails. I think it's due to different expectations for SMS versus email. I think people expect quick responses to texts but are okay with email replies that come one to two days later. Also, texts are limited to 160 characters, and it's slow to type on a phone, so people are more accepting of abbreviations, typos, a lack of capitalization, and bad grammar. Whereas for emails, there are no word limits, and I think generally, people expect you to be more formal and to use proper capitalization and punctuation. The lack of word limits also opens emails up to long essays, and some people don't like reading and responding to long messages, especially on phones. Finally, most people are replying to and sending emails all day long at work, so after work, they just want to get away from email for a while. If you're trying to plan something quickly, which usually requires a lot of back-and-forth communication, texting (or calling) would probably work better than emailing. Before, I would never initiate text conversations, since I had to pay per text, but now that I have a Google Voice number, I can initiate text conversations for free. However, I don't want people to have to maintain two numbers for me: one for texting and one for calling. Google Voice has a solution for this, too. You can enable call forwarding, so when someone calls my Google Voice number, my cell phone rings. I can also call someone and have my Google Voice number show up on their caller ID. There are two ways:
Texts are also saved in your Google Voice inbox, and this allows you to easily search your text history. When someone texts my Google Voice number, I can reply either by texting them back at google.com/voice or by replying to the email notification I get. With both calling and texting abilities from one number, plus notification and forwarding options, I now only need to give people my Google Voice number. Post Comment |