Google Voice for Pilots

At its most basic level, Google Voice works like this: when you sign up you get a new phone number and then can link up to six existing phone numbers to the new GV number. After the initial pain of informing your friends and family of your new number, you can do some seriously cool stuff like routing your calls, customizing rings and outgoing messages, and managing messages in new and innovative ways. Google Voice is a mashup of a fully featured Telex system, Gmail, SMS, and a little black magic-- and it works wonderfully.

Google Voice Feature List

Calling overseas from the US Google Voice will save you some money and provides excellent land-line to land-line voice quality. While you can't initiate calls from overseas to the US, I did find a work around that provided the same end result-- calling home.

You can initiate a call via the web interface or by phone. From Japan, I used the web interface on my laptop to start the call. I specified a previously verified number, an office number in this case, to originate the call and the hotel in Japan was the destination. Once I clicked the "connect" button on the web interface, Google Voice called my office number in the US which was answered by an associate and then connected that phone to the hotel's main switchboard in Japan. My associate asked the operator to ring my room-- and easy as that we're talking for 3 cents per minute land-line to land-line without any annoying delay or artifacting like you hear on Skype.

Another killer feature for airline pilots is the ability to change call rules on the go. Right now this has to be done via the web interface, but I'm sure the mobile app will be added once the service goes public.

If you're like me, I consider my days off, well, days off. I elect to not take calls from work when I'm doing important things around the house like rearranging my sock drawer. Using Google Voice, I can route all calls from the crew desk to voice mail complete with a custom outgoing message. I can elect to get an SMS or email that they called and even a voice transcript via email, all without being bothered on my days off.

These two features only scratch the surface of what's available with Google Voice, but as the service matures it's sure to change the way airline pilots use our phones at work and play.