Brad Feld: Google Voice Was So Very Close To Working

The other feature that I wish was possible is connecting two google voice accounts to one phone number. At first, I thought it was going to be a great solution for our kids; have a single number we give to our school, after school classes, pediatricians, etc that when you called it, it automatically would ring our home phone, my wife's cell, and my cell all at the same time. Unfortunately, you can only attach a phone to a single account, so my wife and I either both have to use it in only this one situation, or simply not use it at all for this situation.

I can see why they limit it because a phone number has a cost associated with it and you wouldn't want a user to have a 100 different voice accts, but I think this kind of usage would be pretty useful.

I use Google Voice as my primary personal number, and have had several folks tell me that it "rings and rings" (voicemail never picks up). And I would have to agree, their transcription is a joke.

All that said, its still a pretty damn good service for being free. But they have a lot of work to do before Voice is ready to be a part of their Google Apps offering.

tl;dr: Google Voice still has no "keep your number" support; poster attempts to forward a phone number to another phone number that forwards to his other phones; hilarity ensues.

I've also noticed that Google Voice, despite its awesome feature set, is just not very reliable. I absolutely prefer to use it as my primary phone number, but I've noticed repeated problems with just using the service, a good deal of the time.

Outbound calls (from my phone) that use the Google Voice service often times just don't connect.

Inbound calls often don't ring my phone, and go straight to voice mail.

I've never noticed an SMS message fail altogether, but I have seen a number of occasions in which it was delayed so significantly that it might as well have.

Perhaps the most important glitch to me (and this isn't a service complaint, so much) is that MMS messages are just ignored. I don't receive them, or any notification that one was sent, and from what I can tell, there is no message / delivery failure sent to the sender either. This is a problem for me.

Despite all these problems, I still LIKE Google Voice, and continue to use it, despite its unreliability. If I'm dealing with time-sensitive matters or financially sensitive ones, I just give out my non-IP phone number, to ensure that I at least get the calls, but my main want for Google Voice is to replace my regular number, so that I can change phones & carriers at will, that doesn't really sit well either.

I've had GV since it was GrandCentral and I still can't make heads or tails of it. I have my GV number, SkypeIn number, plus my regular phone number. All three are using some form of VoIP yet all negotiating takes place over 10 digit number. I thought it would be a great way for me to recieve calls while travelling but the utility is limited at best. Fring is moderately useful in being able to link MSN, Skype, and SIP. But GV is left out.

I'm still waiting on one true phone number to rule them all. Until then I'll continue to use Skype and check my GV mailbox.

The Google Voice number I chose with was bombarded with calls from collections agencies. A freed number is more likely to come from someone who has abandoned their service due to non-payment. Google should have checked for this before offering these numbers. Based on what they've already built screening for collections calls would've been well within what they could do.

When I attempted to disable the number the process was extremely frustrating. I couldn't simply turn it off. I had to reassign it to another valid phone number. (No thanks.) I eventually got around this by following their suggestion to disable several AT&T forwarding and messaging services. This left me unhappy. What if I want to use these services for something else?