Ever wake up after a long night and see you called a bunch of exes but don't remember what you said? We're sure you haven't, but, well, we've heard it happens. Quite a bit.

That’s why we’re excited to announce that today we’re launching the Voice-alyzer setting to hopefully prevent this from ever happening again.

The next time you know an eventful night is in store, head to the Calls tab in Google Voice Settings. Check the “Enable Voice-alyzer” box, and set the hour that you want the feature to go into effect.

With Voice-alyzer enabled, our IVR will prompt you to spell everyday words with your keypad, like “embarrassed”, ”dizzy” or ”Czechoslovakia”, before we connect your call.

If the Voice-alyzer determines that you are not in a fit state to be having a conversation, it will prevent the call from connecting and send you a text message with contact info for 3 local cab companies instead.

Concerned about sending poorly thought out texts? Don’t be, we’ve got you covered there as well. All text messages sent while Voice-alyzer is enabled are scanned for accuracy and held in your outbox if fat-fingered words or more than 2 exclamation points or question marks are detected.

This new feature will be rolling out gradually to all Google Voice users over the next 24 hours.

We hope that you find it to be helpful, and as always, recommend dialing responsibly.

Posted by Tina Donaldson, Anti-Embarrassment Enforcement Officer

Update (12:01 am): Happy April 1st.
Posted by Anonymous
Labels: Google Voice Blog

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.
All things Google Voice!
All things Google Voice!
Twitter Updates


Archive
Archive
Loading