When you click on Play to hear the voice message it actually highlights the text in the text message, or email, as it plays. It's not a perfect translation, in fact it's often a hilariously silly translation, but that's OK because it also attaches the actual voice file to the text message and email. That translated text is sent as a text message to my GN phone and an email to my Gmail account. Once a voice mail is taken by Google Voice it then translates the voice into text. That can be tricky as I need to set each one of those four phones to go at least 5 rings which is how long it takes for GV to pick up. Google Voice must be the answering machine, it must pick up the phone if I don't answer. (Home land line, personal cell phone, company cell phone and company desk top phone.) I never want any of the voice mail systems from any of those four phones to ever pick up and answer the phone. The reason for this is that when someone calls my Google Voice number it actually rings on 4 separate phones at once. All of the voice mail is handled and stored by Google on Google's servers. My phone's phone number is never seen by any recipient of the call.Īs a user of Google Voice, the voice mailbox offered by Verizon that comes with the phone is never used. I don't give out my real number anymore either especially now that MMS works. I know it may sound complex but I love it like that. The 909 number is linked to her 205 number so whenever you text the 909 number it automatically recognizes that as her 205 number but it still shows up to HER as your GV number. Her real number is 205-XXX-XXXX but GV assigned her a number like 909-XXX-XXXX. When I set GV to forward texts to my regular number, her text pops up in GO SMS. For example, I have Tiffany that I text through GV. I just save that number in that persons contact information as cell phone and use it to text/call them. When the texts come through to GO SMS, your native number will assign that person a specific number that you can use. But doing it this way also allows you to send MMS through GV (which a lot of people still dont know actually works now for the most part.) The only issue with that is, if you don't have unlimited texting on your account that option wont work for you. When I do that, I can use GO SMS to text through GV. I just have my GV SMS forwarded to my real number in my GV settings. So, my question is: Are there other SMS clients that will use my Google Voice phone number exclusively? Also, if there are, can I turn off notification from original GV SMS app so that I don't get multiple notifications? I don't see Google making many changes to GV in the future.

There are a lot of things other SMS apps do that GV doesn't. I'd like to be able to do group messaging. For example, I'd like to get a popup window when a message comes in like Handcent does. It's a bland app and doesn't do some things I would like to have. However, I'm not exactly thrilled with GV SMS. That way when a message is sent the recipient sees my GV number and not my phone's real number. So, to keep the phone's number hidden I use Google Voice's SMS app exclusively. Heck, I don't even know my phone's real phone number, I'd have to look in settings. It's been that way for almost 2 years now. No one ever sees messages or receives calls from me that ever show my phone's real phone number they only see my Google Voice number. I use Google Voice exclusively for my phone number.

Google voice send sms via email