Good News and Bad News.  The Good News is that the Google Voice address book has gotten smarter (i.e. more useful).  The Bad News is that our suggestions from our October 18^th article will now break things.

In that article, GVS showed you how to label phone numbers and how to remind yourself of phone numbers that spelled things out.

What’s changed?  Google Voice now dials the letters that are stored as part of phone number entries.  Overall, this is a big improvement.  It answers one of the issues raised in our October 18^th article – you can now directly store and use phone numbers as alpha-numeric strings.  You still have your choice of punctuation options (Parentheses, Dashes, Spaces, Brackets, etc.).  Here are three examples of the new way to do things:

Remember those classic sitcoms?

This isn’t a secret - Leo has given out his Google Voice number during TWiT before.

  instead of 

The Notes are mostly redundant in this case, but still might be handy if you ever have to talk someone through a phone number over the phone.

Considering how many friends that I’ve talked into getting phone numbers that spell something out, I actually look forward to cleaning up my address book.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t help with the other issue – adding descriptive labels to each phone number.  This is especially surprising since Google Voice lets you label your own phone numbers, so instead of two “Work” phone numbers you can label one as “Day Job” and the other one as “Night Job”, etc.  Remember our Busy Kid example:

This doesn’t work anymore!

Here are two less elegant ways to get the same functionality today:

(Yes, GVS realizes that all of its readers would have figured out this one themselves – We’re just putting this here for the sake of completeness.)

It’s still surprising to me that Google Voice gives you the option of labeling other people’s phone numbers as “Home Fax” and “Work Fax”, but doesn’t offer an option for “Google Voice”.  (The best that you can do is label their Google Voice number as “Other”.)  Why is this important?  Because many Google Voice subscribers don’t always use Google Voice for every outgoing call that they make, you still want to have all of their phone numbers in your address book so that Google Voice can match up their incoming calls correctly.  (You also don’t ever want to willingly become dependent on any one system:  Save all of their phone numbers in Google Voice and periodically export all of your Google Voice address book to a file that you store somewhere “in the cloud”, as well as on your own computer or USB backup drive.  Something could go wrong with either your Google Voice account or the Google Voice account of the person that you are calling.  In fact, if you don’t backup your data, something probably will go wrong. L )

Steven (at) GoogleVoiceSecrets.com