Tag Archives: google voice

Easy Way to Record a Meeting

Today at our office (I work for a trade association) we hosted a board meeting and the secretary asked if we could record it so that she could reference the recording later in case she missed anything for her notes. We don't have a digital recorder in the office so our solution was the following:

  • Signed up for a free Google Voice account. 
  • Tied the Voice account to my office phone since you have to tie the Google Voice number to an existing number. 
  • From our conference room phone I called my office phone and had someone answer it and then press "4" to start the recording process. (Google Voice allows you to record any incoming call, but currently you can't record outbound calls which is why we called my office phone from the conference room and not vice versa).
  • The recording is automatically saved as an MP3 in your Google inbox which you can then share as a link you email to whomever you want, embed in a webpage/blog post or download to share offline. 
  • When the meeting was over I simply hung up the phone which ended the recording.
  • After the meeting was over I emailed the secretary the link to the recording and that was that.

Other uses I can picture for this setup:

  • Recording interviews with industry experts over the phone to share on our blog.
  • Recording our educational offerings to be archived or posted online for others to access.

All of this was unbelievably easy to do and the price was definitely right.

Found in Translation

A few weeks ago I started using Google Voice in a serious way.  I'd just gotten a Blackberry for work so I ended up with two mobile numbers for the first time in my life.  I figured that if I could link both numbers to a Google Voice number then I could still just have one mobile number to share with everyone and get all my calls even if I was only carrying one of my mobiles.

One of the utilities that Google Voice provides is a transcription of each voice mail.  The transcript is hardly ever 100% accurate, but it's almost always close enough that you get the gist of the message.  Still, there are some funny, uh, translations.  Here's the latest:

 Hi. It's John baptized before 2 o'clock get a chance give me a call at ***-**** Thanks