Okay, Google Voice officially fucking RULES. I’ve had it since last summer, but rarely used it (did a short while for P. to send me SMS before I boosted my limit) because I didn’t want to give out a new number to everyone and then have it turn out that I didn’t care for GV after all and wanted to go back to just using my normal mobile number…and would have to tell everyone to go back to that number. I discovered today, though, that GV can do something that makes me very, very happy. Even if you don’t want to use the GV number, you can set it so that the voice mails for any number are forwarded to GV to be transcribed. AWESOME! I hate voice mail. I don’t know why, and it’s certainly unreasonable, but I abso-fucking-lutely hate voice mail. Even the iPhone’s visual voice mail, which at least means I don’t have to navigate through pressing a billion buttons and can just touch the play button. Nope, still hate voice mail. I never listen to them; I just look to see who called and then call them back because chances are about 90% that’s all the message says anyway. Besides, I get an alert for a missed call right away, but AT&T’s voice mail service is so goddamned slow that it might be an hour after the call before I get the notification, or it might be the next day, and a few times, I’ve never got notification at all. AT&T sucks for almost everything, but their voice mail is particularly horrendous. Now, I don’t have to concern myself with voice mail at all because when someone calls my mobile and leaves me a voice mail message, it gets forwarded to GV, and I immediately get a text message telling me that I have a new voice mail (gives me a short preview of the transcribed message, too), and also an email with the full transcription, plus a link to listen to the message if I so choose (which I won’t unless the transcription totally fails to get the message across). It’s a machine transcription, so it won’t be 100% accurate, but my tests show it to be at least as accurate as Dragon’s NaturallySpeaking with my voice, so as long as the caller doesn’t truly mumble or have an industrial-strength accent, it should be fine, and if the voice mail simply says (as T. often does), “Hey, call me when you get a chance,” I can just look at the text message and call her instead of starting the phone app, poking the voice mail page (this assumes that AT&T has actually notified me that I have new voice mail on the same day the caller left it), then hitting play and hearing muffled words until I remember to poke “speaker”, only to hear her…ask me to call her. Damn, I hate voice mail. 🙂