Google Voice is one of those services that seems to get absolutely no love from the company, especially when compared to Gmail, Chrome, and the rest of the heavy hitters. It was fortunate enough to receive an upgrade last month that included a few new shortcuts for making new calls and text conversations directly from your phone’s home screen.
Google is still showing its love for Voice, and we’re already looking at a fresh version that adds some much-needed new features for processing incoming calls.
This week’s update is all about establishing rules for handling incoming calls. Google Voice has been able to redirect calls for a long time, and you can now tweak it even further. You can create a rule that forwards calls from a contact or contact group to any of your associated numbers or directly to voicemail if you don’t wish to take the call. And, while you could always screen calls, you can now screen specific contacts selectively. The update includes a new function that allows you to generate bespoke voicemail greetings for individual contacts, in addition to call prevention and redirection.
All of these new options will be turned off by default, so you’ll need to go to Voice on the web to start configuring them – you can get additional information on how to customise each rule on Google’s support website. Keep in mind that you can only create and manage rules on the site right now, and the Voice mobile app can just display them. Everyone should be seeing the options by now, so go ahead and try them out for yourself.
Though they are still waiting for a major Material You redesign, these recent changes show that Google Voice isn’t going away anytime soon.