My Days are Numbered- Hanging up on Google Voice

Google has my phone number.  In fact my number dates back to Grand Central before the Google buyout.

I have had one phone number for a long time and the thought of changing it scares me.  Also I am still at con so this is a pure research post for now, changing my number can’t happen until later.

Basically I hate the phone and I loved how voice let me often get around actually using the phone most of the time.  Also overseas and long distance are non-issues for me with my cell plan.

My needs:

• Needs to ring my phone
• Need to send transcribed voicemail to email
• Would like to be able to remap it to ring other phones

Products  considered were Skype, Frig, Line2 and Jumblo.  You know what, I am not going to do a detailed review because none of these will actually solve my problem, they are designed to get around long distance rates.  A useful tool but not what I need.

So this is lame but what I am going to do is use my cell phone pretty normally, including the number I have.

The only wrinkle is using either the terribly named fusion voice mail plus or youmail to get visual voicemail functionality for free and possibly paying for transcription with youmail if visual voicemail plus’s free offering doesn’t do what I want.   It isn’t that the other services are not good, they seem fine, but they are just not offering a solution for my problem, which is not wanting to actually talk to people on the phone.

So I will try both of these and update you when I know more about which works with actual calls.

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