In the News - Google Voice Update

Attorneys use Google Voice more often than you might think. In fact, about 1 out of 10 attorneys who sign up with us at Answering Legal use Google’s free system. But since it first came out in 2009, it hadn’t been updated much, according to David Pogue of Yahoo Finance , until this year, when Google released some brand new features for its formerly neglected smartphone app that boasts more than 3.5 million users.

Basically, Google Voice is a Voice over IP (VoIP) application for your smart phone that gives you a free telephone number, and essentially allows you to carry two phone numbers on one phone - a work number and a personal number. Attorneys love this app because it allows them to compartmentalize their personal lives and their professional lives. They give the Google Voice number out to their clients and customers, and their personal number is for their friends and families. Best of all, Google Voice is free! You can direct the number to ring in multiple places, send text messages, and make outgoing calls for the price of zero dollars. This can make attorneys completely mobile by being able to answer the Google Voice calls inside their office on their office line, and outside of their office on their cell phone when they are available.

However, Google hadn’t updated this feature much since 2009, and we know from our end that many attorneys were no longer happy with Google Voice; switching to VoIP systems that included smartphone applications like Vonage, RingCentral, Pinger, and others. But finally, Google has updated its VoIP app with the ability to send pictures inside of text messages, easier to control settings, transcribed voicemail, and a much cleaner design that intuitively separates your text messages, calls, and contacts.

Attorneys can now configure their settings and sync their contacts with the new Google Voice app, instead of using Google Hangouts, and its reliability has significantly approved! This is huge, since the major problem attorneys experienced with Google Voice was the overall reliability of sending and receiving phone calls/text messages. We might be experiencing even more attorneys who are switching to Google Voice than ever before. There is even a new Google Chrome extension that allows you access to voicemail, calling, and texting, right from your computer! Try it out for yourself! It’s completely free, and you might just love it.

Sources:

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/we-just-got-the-first-google-voice-update-in-over-5-years-214255119.html

https://blog.google/products/google-voice/ringing-2017-updates-our-google-voice-apps/

https://www.google.com/googlevoice/whatsnew.html

https://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html