867-5309 could be one of the most iconic phone numbers of all time, but it’s not the only number that a lot of us remember by heart. Many of us have a phone number that we've shared with family, friends, and contacts over the years and are reluctant to let go.

One of the most frequent requests we hear from people who use (or want to use) Google Voice is that they’d like to get all of Google Voice’s features without having to give up their long-time phone numbers.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Number Porting is available for all existing Google Voice users. This means you can make the mobile number you’ve always used your Google Voice number, so it can ring any phone you want—or even your computer.



To get started with Number Porting, log in to your Google Voice account, visit the Settings page and click on “Change / Port” next to your Google Voice number.



Porting your number to Google Voice costs $20 and is usually completed within 24 hours. You may incur additional charges, including early termination fees, from your wireless carrier. Contact your carrier to get more details about the charges applicable to you.

After porting your number to Google Voice your mobile service plan will be cancelled, and there are a couple of steps that you’ll have to take to continue making and receiving calls on your mobile device. For more detailed instructions on how Number Porting works and to find tips for making the process as smooth as possible, visit the Google Voice Help Center.

Number Porting is currently available for existing Google Voice users and will become available to new users within the next few weeks, and at this time, Google Voice is available in the U.S. only.

Posted by Robert Dong, Software Engineer

Update (1:15PM): Included more details about the porting process.
Posted by Anonymous
Labels: Google Voice Blog googlenew number porting

Thanks for all of your feedback on last week's Hangouts launch. We just posted an update on Google Voice and Hangouts on Google+.

(Cross posted on Gmail Blog)

With the big day right around the corner, activity in the North Pole is hitting a fever pitch. Yet, Santa will always make time to send a personalized holiday phone calls from Santa to your friends and family via his personal Google Voice line (aka Send a Call from Santa).

To send a message, find the Call Center in Santa’s Village.

Google Voice helps you customize how you treat callers by giving you the ability to play a custom greeting for your parents or send your chatty neighbor straight to voicemail.

Many users have asked us for controls aimed at people who are NOT in their address book. So today, we’re adding two groups of callers for Google Voice users:

People in your address book: this allows you to customize the experience of all contacts in your address book. This also works by exclusion.

When we asked our users what features they’d like to see in Google Voice, we heard a lot of different answers. And we listened very closely to all of them. A few themes stood out for us: you’d like to see us bring more awesome features to your phones, and you’d like to see Google Voice in other countries. But we asked ourselves: is this ambitious enough? Surely we can do something even better than that. And that’s when the future became clear to us: Dogs and cats. Texting. Together.

Since we launched Google Voice back in 2009, we’ve supported visual voicemail so you could open the Google Voice app, see all your voicemails with text transcripts, and play them on-demand. But sometimes when I get a missed call, I don’t want to jump between my call log and the Google Voice app to see who has called me and what message they left.

So, today, we’re updating our mobile app so you can view and listen to your voicemails on demand directly from the call log on your Android phone.

To help make it even easier for you to organize your contacts, today we’re adding Google+ Circles to Google Voice. Circles give you more control over how you manage your callers; for example, calls from your “Creepers” circle can be sent straight to Voicemail, only your “College Buddies” circle will hear you rap your voicemail greeting, or you can set your “Family” circle to only ring your mobile phone.

Sometimes the times that we’re offline can be our most productive times. However, whether on a plane or out of range of coverage, it’d still be nice to be able to draft text messages. With this new app, you can now compose new messages (single recipients for now) while offline and the app will automatically queue them and send them out when you’re connected again.

We hope you enjoy this new feature.

(Cross-posted from the Gmail blog)

As the holiday season approaches, we're happy to announce that we've extended free domestic calls within the US and Canada for 2012. This is our way of helping you connect with friends and family across the country. And you can still call the rest of the world from Gmail at our insanely low rates.

MMS has been one of the constant feature requests since we launched Google Voice and we’ve been hard at work trying to make this happen.

Today, we're happy to announce that we've made the first step in our efforts to bring this feature to our users. Google Voice users are now able to receive pictures and other multimedia messages from Sprint subscribers.

As you may have noticed, the Google Voice blog looks a lot different today. That’s because we—along with a few other Google blogs—are trying out a new set of Blogger templates called Dynamic Views.

Launched today, Dynamic Views is a unique browsing experience that makes it easier and faster for readers to explore blogs in interactive ways.
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