In addition to making free long distance calls within the continental US, you can now call Canada for free through Google Voice. We offered this feature in GrandCentral previously, and in an effort to provide as many useful features as we can for free, we're happy to bring those free calls to Canada to Google Voice users as well.

You can initiate calls from your inbox online, from our new mobile apps, or by dialing your own Google Voice number from one of your phones and selecting option 2 to place a call.

Please note that Google Voice is only available in the US, and you'll need a working US phone to setup a Google Voice account.

Posted by Brian Peterson
Software Engineer

In our last post, Carol and I signed up for our Google Voice numbers, and read the Google Voice Getting Started Guide for information. Today, I'd like to share my first experience with the Google Voice website and the "Click to call" feature. After setting up my forwarding phones, I noticed the green arrow Call button at the top left of the homepage. Intuitively, I typed Carol's number into the "Call" box, but I was a bit confused when asked to choose a "phone to ring." I selected the existing option (which was my cell) and clicked Connect.

I wasn't expecting my cell phone to ring, but when it did, I picked up the call. After a few seconds of wondering, "Hold on, why am I calling myself?", Carol answered the line. I explained I was calling from my new Google Voice number, so she saved my new number in her address book. (If you use Gmail, you'll notice that your address book is shared across these products. This means you'll see all your Gmail contacts in Google Voice and any changes to your Google Voice contacts will be reflected in your other Google products.)

After hanging up, I realized I could choose which phone (cell, home, or desk) I wanted to use to connect to Carol. Pretty cool! Google Voice acts like a hub; you decide which phone you want to use each time you place a call, or you can check the "Remember my choice"** box to use the same phone anytime you place an outbound call from the web. When you click connect, Google Voice will ring that phone and dial out to your desired recipient. When I use the click to call feature, my Google number displays on the outbound caller ID. Now that I've done this a few times, it's not so surprising when my own phone rings when I place a call via the website.

A quick read on the different calling options for Google Voice can be found in the Google Voice Help article Google Voice Basics: Making Calls. And you can always post any other questions you may have in the Getting Started category of the Google Voice Help Forum.

Posted by Heather and Carol
Googlers

** The "Remember my choice" feature can be a bit confusing. After experimenting with it, I learned that the number selected is remembered by machine. For example, on my work laptop, I can choose my work phone as "Phone to ring", and select "Remember my choice". This means from now on, when I want to dial out via my work laptop, my work number will be selected to ring by default. If I go home and use my home desktop to dial out, I can select my home number as "Phone to ring", and select "Remember my choice". From now on, my home phone will ring when I dial out of my home desktop, and my work phone will ring if I dial out of my work laptop.

Hi there! Heather and I work at Google, but are new to Google Voice. Over the next couple months, we'll be exploring this service and sharing our experiences on the Google Voice blog. We hope that by seeing the service through the eyes of a new user, our initial reactions will help us identify areas that might need more explanation, and provide this feedback to the Voice team. We'd also like to highlight some of Google Voice's features and share ideas on how to get the most out of this service.

Today, we signed up for our Google Voice phone numbers. Signing up and choosing a number is pretty straightforward. I love chocolate, so I tried to integrate that into my number. I was initially excited with my vaguely food-related number, but thinking it over a bit more, I probably won't be so proud of it when I'm 70. Scratch that. When I'm 35. Heather likes to surf, so she's pretty happy with her aquatic themed number. Keep in mind that once you pick your number, you won't be able to change it (unless you pay a $10 fee). Just like the Grail Knight said to Indiana Jones, choose wisely!

After Heather and I registered our numbers, we stopped... What do we do next? After a quick poke around, we found our answers in the Google Voice Getting Started Guide, which takes you step by step into the world of Voice.

We'll conclude this post with our recommendation to check out the Google Voice Getting Started Guide; also, consider checking out the Getting Started category in the Google Voice Help Forum. These sites really helped us find our voice (pun intended!).

Posted by Carol and Heather
Googlers

Voicemail transcription is a popular feature of Google Voice. Having the ability to receive a transcript of a new voicemail by email or SMS and get a quick idea of what a voicemail is about, saves you time in deciding which voicemails are worth listening to.

Since transcription is fully automated and most people often don't talk in the same organized manner that they write, it is tricky to insert punctuation into a message. And reading long messages without punctuation can feel weird.

Today we made some more progress on transcript readability and launched an improved transcription engine with punctuation. Don't expect it to insert question marks for your callers' questions, but it should help make your message transcripts easier to read by breaking them into sentences separated by periods.

We hope you will like the improvement...

Posted by Vincent Paquet

It is hard enough to keep in touch with family and friends, but imagine being half-way around the world in a place like Iraq with limited access to telephones…or having to move and change your phone number every couple years. The military lifestyle often presents unique communication challenges that Google Voice can make easier, so we are giving priority invites (sent within a day) to active military and reserves with .mil email addresses at: www.google.com/militaryinvite.

For more details, see our post on the Official Google blog. If you don’t have a .mil email address, you can still make an invite request on our site.

Posted by Brian Hutchins
Google Voice Product Marketing Manager