One of the few necessary evils that accompanies the uber-cool and recently launched Google Voice service (which was officially released in March) is the necessity to convert all of your numbers (cell, landline, office) to one number. It can be an annoying and daunting task to change your cell phone number, especially if you are reliant on your cell for business and personal communications. Mobile startup Skydeck’s new mashup with Google Voice may help you avoid the hassle of changing at least your cell phone number while still letting you use Google Voice.
While Google Voice is all your numbers online, Skydeck’s service, which came out of beta earlier this year, is just your cell phone online. Via an app on your cell phone, all your calls, text messages, voicemails and contacts are backed up on Skydeck.com and you can search, read, and reply to your messages (by voice or by text) from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone. If you don’t answer a call, Skydeck takes a voicemail, converts the speech to text, and sends you an email. If you are at your desk, you can call or text people from Skydeck. The call appears to come from your cell phone, so your friends will know who it is. Similar to Google Voice, you read a transcribed version of each voicemail (via SpinVox). It works best on Blackberry and Android phones (although most of the features work on nearly any phone), and costs $9.95 a month. By offering a free service to Google Voice users, Skydeck hopes to acquire new customers who may be receptive to its service.
The catch with Skydeck is that it can’t help you with your other phones, i.e. office and home lines, and the full version of Skydeck isn’t free (like Google Voice). Google Voice, which was formerly GrandCentral (a service Google acquired for $50+ million in 2007) ties all your phones together with one new number that rings them all. It definitely simplifies your phone correspondence and management. That is, once you switch over all of your numbers to a new number.
You give out the one phone number, administer it with a website or voice menu, and forward calls to various devices depending on who’s calling and when. Google Voice lets you accept and send text messages, transcribes voicemails, and lets you specify settings for certain callers (whether they go directly to voicemail). In addition, Google Voice’s interface is a comprehensive Gmail-like inbox (and is also added to the list of links in your Google Apps) with tabs for voicemail, SMS, Recorded calls, Placed calls, Received calls and Missed calls. And all SMS and transcribed voicemails are searchable and taggable.
Both Skydeck and Google Voice are extremely useful services, especially considering the slow death of voicemail. But if you use your cell phone most of the time and don’t want to go through the hassle of changing your phone number and operating it through Google Voice, Skydeck now offers you the option of using a free or paid version Skydeck to manage your cellphone and Google Voice to manage your other phone lines. Skydeck will configure your phone so that the calls you miss on your cell will go to Google Voice. Messages will still be copied to Skydeck so that your cell phone calls, texts and voicemails are in the same place.
While I wish I could not have to change my cell phone number and still have all the numbers in my life be controlled by one service (like Google Voice), I have realized that I can’t have my cake and eat it too. One of the sole drawbacks to Google Voice is the requirement to change your phone number and for those of you who, like me, completely rely on your cell phone and don’t own a land line, that’s a big sacrifice. In a way, Skydeck’s offering gives you the best of both worlds. And you can access most of the key features of Skydeck, mashed up with Google Voice, for free.
Here’s a video which demos the new mashup:
This sounds like DYNAMITE. Holy mother of god.
Sounds good, but I’d rather have more info about the future of Google Voice, personally. I have had a GrandCentral account for what seems like ages, yet still can’t change my GrandCentral/Google Voice number (which is now in an area code that’s far far away from any that would be useful), and it seems impossible to get another account with a better number.
Anyone have any insight on getting a new “invitation” or getting Google to change the number?
Living abroad, Google voice has made calling the US for cheap a breeze. Google Voice from my iPhone browser lets me pick a number to call, which is routed through skype (in & out) to my local mobile. Hence no long distance charges.
Interestingly, Google hints at supporting number porting in the future – might solve some of the number switching problems.
I am still anxiously waiting for my Google Voice invite. Am I alone here?
get one at ebay for $1300
http://cgi.ebay...rkparms=72:1234|66:2|65:12|39:1|240:1318|301:1|293:1|294:50
useless – having a tool to manage something which again manages your phone call is lousy to the best.
its more like spinvox + g voice which can be done now directly rather than using this service.
Sorry but this is just a facebook test.
I think google is on the verge of taking over the world! Sounds very cool and I always look forward to advancements by google that make my duties as an entrepreneur evem more proficient. Thanks for the post!
I’ve been using Youmail and Grandcentral/GV for a couple of years and they’ve been working well but I’ll give Skydeck a whirl out of curiosity.
Where is the iphone support?
Are there still invites floating around for Google Voice? I’ve been trying to get in since it was Grand Central with no luck.
Or better yet when are they going to open up for more users?
You can request an invitation for Google Voice here:
https://service...glevoiceinvite/
It’s not open to the public yet.
If you are looking for a simple way to solve phone management while keeping your existing number, try LetsCallMe.com. LetsCallMe offers an easy way to manage who calls you on your existing phones (landline and cell) and a variety of powerful call management and messaging tools such as automatic “do not disturb” settings, custom messaging and call blocking. It’s way less than Skydeck and designed for easy web use.
Check it out at http://www.letscallme.com.
Thanks Hart. I added my email to that back when it was GrandCentral. Still waiting… hopefully soon because it looks beyond amazing.
Leena, were you paid to write this story? Sounds an awful lot like Skydeck marketing folks wrote it for you.
I’ve tried switching over to Google Voice a couple of times but found that with T-Mobile there was just too much of a lag time and calls would hit my mailbox before the phone would ring. I was just missing too many calls.
The comment about having to switch all your numbers is a bit misleading. With Google Voice, you keep all your individual numbers but you do need a new uber number that Google Voice will give you that becomes an alias for the collection of all your numbers so if you want to use this service, you will need to give out this new number to your contacts.
People can still call you directly to your individual numbers so you dont give those up.
right, but I think the point is that if you use GV then you only want to give out one number and manage it all behind the scenes, thus over time most wouldn’t know you’re real cell number
WHICH IS A GOOD THING.
You give your direct line to your BESTEST friends, and your GV number to everyone.
It’s totally misleading, or Leena is a moron about what GV actually does. You aren’t changing your number, you’re adding a number. It’s an add, pure and simple. Adds do require new business cards if you want your non-friends to call you at your GV number. I call that the price of weeding out the phone-chaff.
But the article makes it sound like you need to change your cell, landline, etc numbers. Which is COMPLETE bull.
The story is more than misleading, it’s wrong. The GV number does not replace any existing numbers a user may have. You don’t have to give up any numbers, merely add a new one, the GV #.
Jason from Skydeck here. David and Jack, you can of course use give out Google Voice as an *extra* number – you could use it as your work number or just give it to people that you don’t trust with your cell phone number. But then you can’t use it to track all of your calls, you can’t save your SMS messages, once people have your cell phone number they stop calling your Google Voice number etc.
If you want to use Google Voice as your primary number – which is what Google intends – you run into the problems that Leena describes above, and Skydeck is offering a solution.
I really really don’t run into this problem. In fact, there are many pluses to a dual identity scenario, I think most people are familiar with these from having separate work and home numbers… I don’t want my boss to know that ALL my calls go to a single number and I’m weeding them out. I want him to think “huh, he’s not in, I’ll leave a message, and he’ll get back to me on Monday.” Likewise, I don’t want everyone in the company to have what amounts to my private line (when you have a single unified number, then people ARE getting your private line, all the time).
Of course, you can still screen calls, but now you’re making it painfully obvious to someone that you are ignoring them if you don’t pick up/reply quickly.
I get the slant of Leena’s and your points, Jason… But it’s very Valley-centric to be full-on 24/7, and certainly not healthy (perhaps Mike could chime in, I recall a trip to Hawaii…).
Multiple numbers == good!
I have a few things to say. I used to use GrandCentral and then recently migrated to Google Voice. The call quality of Google Voice is really bad. (Some callees don’t get it that bad, but most do)
Almost all outgoing calls I make via GV have horrible call quality.
The other thing is a couple important things, you can’t make free calls to Canada using GV (costs you 1c). GC, however, allows you to – for free.
GC allows you to add new phone numbers to your account, like home number, work number, etc that are in Canada and then when you migrate to GV, it’ll still work. But once you’re in GV, you will not be allowed to add a Canadian phone number.
Having given some facts for future migrators, here’s what I think of Skydeck. I think it’s great. There’s one other online service like Skydeck and it’s called Dashwire. It’s primarily for backup. But you can send text messages through it’s website and they go out via your phone. Making calls, unfortunately, work only if you have a Skype client installed (It calls the Skype application to allow you to make the outgoing call, not your phone’s)
So, I’m thinking I will give Skydeck a try. Just so I can send text’s and make calls through it. Don’t know about letting them use my GV yet.
Soon there will be an open source offering with similar capabilities as this, but more like Wordpress so one can either self-host or have it hosted (like Skydeck). Then one only needs to change SIP trunk providers if quality or service become an issue. And the data-mining/ privacy issues also go away. Telephony software is becoming a commodity fast.
google voice gives me free calls from spain to the usa.to cells as well all free with g5 as my call back number..in spain however it sucks as the local phone company charges much more here so call from pstn to sip is an arm and a leg///when will google bite that bullet and give us in europe a fight between telefonica and google .pc to fon should be free here as well
Coldbrew, interesting. I don’t understand how they are sending texts and calls from my phone number without any involvement with my carrier? They must have a VOIP system that can clone/mimic other phone numbers? Is that a commodity offering I can buy? I’ve looked with no luck… can anyone tell me where to look?
It depends on a client-server strategy. All these apps run a lightweight client on your phone. Once you go to their website and do whatever, these changes are pushed to the always-on client running in the background on your device which does what is needed, like send a text or modify a contact.
If you have a Windows Mobile phone, check out Dashwire.
I got grandcenteral and nobody call me. I feel lonely
personally, i think that the next big move GV will make is to allow number portability…