Gadgetory

as a voice subscriber since the days of Grand Central I was starting to think Google was going to kill this service I have a pretty terrible track record of investing in services which are cool but fail to find some consumer excitement when reports started filtering in that Google was updating voice I assumed we'd see the end of this standalone service that we'd see it lumped into an existing product like project buy so you can understand why I'm so excited to see this wasn't the case neglected for far too long voice has gotten a significant rework a fresh coat of paint and a few new tricks what is Google voice well we'll let the service describe itself in its own words welcome to google voice google voice gives you a single phone number that rings all of your phone face your voice now online and transcribe your voicemail to text other cool features include the ability to listen in on messages while they're dating left welcome one of colors and make tape international call we hope you enjoy using google voice not only useful for managing multiple phone numbers through one master account it's also super handy for replying to text messages through a proper computer a feature iOS and hangouts users are certainly familiar with now reviewing something like this is always fraught with danger and that I'm likely to show off a ton of personal information it would be a futile exercise showing my real account looking like some redacted document on a conspiracy site so you won't see the full scope of how deeply entrenched I am in Google Voice you'll just have to trust me I'm in pretty deep setting up a new account must be done through a proper computer browser but once completed installing the new app will swap the web interface over to a sleek new side panel look app on your phone is cleaner and more in keeping with modern apps I still don't like top screen mounted hamburger menus but it's more consistent with other Google services sliding right and left will move you through text calls and voicemails and for some reason you're managing multiple voice accounts you can now cycle through them here like you can a Gmail shortcuts allow for fast access to archived messages famine marking all of your messages as read the last is particularly helpful as reading a voicemail transcript won't mark it as read so I often ended up with hundreds of unheard messages the settings menu has a prettier interface but a few features are very deeper than they used to for example options like call recording by hitting the number four while in a call now need to be manually activated in advanced settings also we no longer seem to have options for conditional call forwarding so hopefully this means Google's call routing and smarter and we won't have to fight carriers of her voicemail issues trying to manually enter a call forwarding dialer code resulted in this error message from Google Voice after the first day voicemail seem to be recorded properly and are played back fine through this app interface fingers crossed it stays that way unfortunately we do seem to lose the voicemail widget which came with older versions of voice but hey I was trying to simplify my home screens anyway right and what do we have here and MMS message properly showing up inside the voice app well that's just crazy pants if any part of the voice service was a hallmark for how neglected this app had become it was the lack of support for group text and picture messages this is a long overdue but ridiculously welcome update to a service which has been mission critical to people managing multiple devices or who want a little extra peace of mind that they'll never have to switch or port a phone number ever again well done well done indeed as always thanks so much for watching be sure to subscribe to this channel for more app reviews like these and help us out some sharing on your favorite social networks for pocket now I'm Juan Carlos bag now some gadget guy on Twitter and Instagram and I will catch you all on the next video