I have google voice and it's great. It does transcribe voice mails into text so you can read them. For mobile you can have the transcribed text sent to your phone as a Text (SMS) message so you can read them on your mobile phone as well.
The transcribes will have some mistakes of course. My name is Ron but when someone says "Hi Ron" in the voice mail I sometimes read "Hi Ryan". But you can usually work out the mistakes you get by the content of the message.
Another example is someone asked me about my "Black Fedora Hat" (That's the hat you see me wearing in my avatar). But the text read "Black four door at".
The voice recognition is improving though. It's actually not that bad at all considering it's being read from a phone. Give it a couple of years and it'll be even better. But I'm getting a lot of use out of it already.
Another things that's great is this. If you use a "Pay as you go" phone and you run out of minutes. You can still send and receive your text messages on line on the google voice site.
I'll walk you through the features that I, as a deaf person is using.
I first got a google voice phone number they assigned to me. You can have more then one phone number. What you'll do is enter your location (Area code, city, etc...) and it'll give you a list of phone numbers you can use that are for your area. You pick on of them and this will be your phone number.
Now you can link this phone number to your phone. You can link it to up to 7 phones. For example your home land line, mobile, work, etc.. You can turn these "links" on and off any time you want to. So basically is someone calls your google voice number they are calling what ever phone you assign to it. If for example you go on a vacation you can turn you work and home phones off and only receive your calls on your mobile phone.
So, if someone sends a text message to your google number you'll be able to read and reply to that text from your phone or from the google voice website. So if the battery on your phone dies. No problem. Just go on line and read and reply to your text messages.
Someone calls your google voice number and leaves a voice mail. You can read it on line or have it sent to your phone as a text message. You can also have it sent to you in an email. All these options can be turned on and off at any time by adjusting your settings.
You can block phones from calling you if you don't want them to.
All calls are free in the US. Your mobile phones will still be charged what ever it normally is for a text message but if you don't open them on your phone then it won't cost anything if you open them on google voice.
The google voice looks and works like a Gmail account.
Hope that helps.
Ron Jaxon
