Google Voice Mashup
(Everything below is covered in the video.)
Today we’re announcing a mashup of Skydeck and Google Voice that gives you the core features of both for free.
First, in case you don’t know, what is Skydeck and what is Google Voice?
Skydeck is your cell phone online. All your calls, text messages, voicemails and contacts are backed up on Skydeck.com and you can search, read, and reply to your messages (by voice or by text) from Skydeck as if it were your cell phone.
There’s no change to your phone number or the way you use your phone. The Skydeck app on your phone backs up all of your contacts, calls and texts to Skydeck.com. If you don’t answer a call, Skydeck takes a voicemail, converts the speech to text, and sends you an email. If you are at your desk, you can call or text people from Skydeck. The call appears to come from your cell phone, so your friends will know who it is.
The catch? Skydeck can’t help you with your other phones, and the full version of Skydeck isn’t free.
Google Voice is a cool new service that ties all your phones together with one new number that rings them all. You answer the nearest one. But if you use a cell phone most of the time and you just want to manage it online using Google Voice, it doesn’t work very well:
* You have to change your phone number
* You have to change the way you make phone calls and place all your calls through Google
* If Google Voice is down, no one can reach you at all
What you really need is for Skydeck to manage your cell, and for Google Voice to manage your other phones. That’s what mashups are for.
Sign up for the free version of Skydeck and it will keep track of all your contacts, calls, and texts. Starting today, if you go to My Account → External Voicemail in Skydeck, we’ll show you how to configure your phone so that the calls you miss go to Google Voice. You can tell Google to try all your other phones first, or go straight to voicemail. Either way, the messages are copied to Skydeck, so that all your cell phone calls, texts, and voicemails are in one place.
It’s all free. There’s no need to change your number, no need to change the way you make phone calls, and if the whole Internet goes down your cell phone is not affected.
Why are we doing this? It’s cool. It costs us very little. And if some people decide to upgrade to the full version of Skydeck to take advantage of our near 100% accurate voicemail transcription or unlimited domestic calling (without using your cell phone minutes), we won’t complain.
That’s how you get the core features of Skydeck and Google Voice for free. Go crazy.