How to Refresh Your Voicemail with Google Voice

Traditional operator voicemail He bad, but annoying when callers hear your greeting and then have to listen through a robot woman talking about your options like “press 1 to hear callback number. Or press 2 for more options”.

This is really frustrating. You can also control and listen only from your phone with traditional voicemail. However, we’ll show you a way to overhaul your voicemail and bring it into the 21st century.

We’ll be using Google Voice for this tutorial, but don’t worry; Once you’ve set everything up, you won’t even have to barely touch Google Voice in the future. Running your voicemail via Google Voice allows voicemails to be sent directly to your email or via text message. Google Voice even transcribes your voice messages so you can read them — Yes! You can do you read your voicemails and that’s it.

Set up a Google Voice Number

Before you can overhaul your voicemail, you need to get your own Google Voice number. If you already have a Google Voice number, skip this section and move on to the next.

Set up Google Voice Voicemail

This is where we finally replace your annoying and boring carrier voicemail for a much better alternative. To switch, follow these steps:

Managing Your New Voicemail

Now that your phone uses Google Voice voicemail, you can customize the settings to optimize your voicemail experience. Here are the options you can choose from:

Google Voice Mobile App

The mobile app isn’t required, but it makes it easy to manage your voicemail on the go. Otherwise, you’ll need to sign in to voice.google.com in your mobile web browser to manage them all. The app also has a few settings you’ll get if you want, including Do Not Disturb and Click2Call, a feature that lets Google first call your phone and then connect your call, but that’s just you using your Google Voice number to call someone.