My ADHD Brain: Turn Cellular Voicemails into Emails and Texts with Google Voice

Hi, everyone!  It's Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel. In today's video, I'll show you how to use Google Voice to turn your iPhone voicemails into emails or texts. 

Has this ever happened to you?  You happen to open your phone app and realize that you have 6 voicemails you haven't listened to?  Some of these could be days old since you haven't been checking regularly.  

If you've watched my overview video on the processes I use to cope with my ADHD brain, you'll know that I try to use Gmail to single stream all of the information that comes into my life.  So, that means getting voicemails into my email inbox. For my landline, I use a digital service that Verizon provides, but I needed to be more creative for my iPhone voicemails. 

Essentially, what you are doing is replacing the indigenous iPhone voicemail service with Google Voice's service which is more feature rich. Frankly, I don't entirely understand all of the services that Google Voice provides, but since I only use it for this very narrow purpose, I feel okay about that.  I'll walk you through the steps:

Step 1 - Sign up for a Google Voice account at voice.google.com.  Since this is one of the suite of free services that Google provides, if you already have a Gmail account, then you already have this service available to you, but you do need to activate it by clicking on Get Google Voice.  You can usually choose a number that is within your area code, but the number is not important for this purpose.

Step 2 - Connect your cell phone with Google Voice.  Enter your cell phone number when prompted and follow the instructions to link your cell phone number with Google Voice using a text message or phone call. 

Step 3 - Install the Google Voice app on your phone and sign in, so that you can see and listen to messages.

Step 4 - Turn on Conditional Call Forwarding with your cellular provider.  Okay -- this is where things get a little tricky. I will show you how to do this if you have Verizon Wireless as your provider, but if not, you'll have to figure out how to do this with your specific carrier.  You may need to call and ask for instructions on how to turn on Conditional Call Forwarding.  If you just turn on regular Call Forwarding, that means that instead of your cell phone ringing, it will automatically be forwarded to another number.  Instead, Conditional Call Forwarding means that it will only be forwarded if certain conditions are met.  In this case, we want it to forward only if the call is unanswered or busy.  In other words, instead of going to voicemail, we want the call to ring the Google Voice number.  Most carriers will have a specific code to dial directly from your phone to turn this service on. For Verizon, you dial *72 and then the 10-digit number you want to forward calls to.  For example, *721234567890. After you hit send, you should get 3 beeps which is a confirmation that it worked.  

Step 5 - Forward voicemails to email or text.  This is best to do from a computer browser since the mobile apps and websites don't give nearly as many options.  Okay, to make sure this is set up properly, log into voice.google.com and bring up the top menu (which is 3 lines or 3 dots, they both take you to the same place), then choose Settings.  Now choose Voicemail and then choose whether you want to receive voicemails by texts, email or both.  

Step 6 - Optional custom voicemail.  I don't know why they make this so difficult, but if you want to change the standard voicemail, you also need to do this from a computer browser.  Bring up the top menu and this time choose Legacy Google Voice.  Okay -- now you are in the old interface, which they clearly haven't migrated everything from yet.  So, hit the gears icon, then Settings, then Voicemail & Text and here you can record a brand new greeting or just your name which will be used in conjunction with the standard greeting.  Just a note: the service will call your phone to have you record the greeting using your phone.  

Now we're done!  Not only did this take me forever to figure out originally -- it actually took me almost as long to figure it out for the SECOND time to do this video.  Let's do a quick demo. I'm going to call myself from my landline and leave a message. "This is a test message to show how well this Google Voice voicemail works."  Okay -- I have this set up to send me a text and an email.  So, here's the email and here is the text message.  The transcription isn't always perfect, but it's generally good enough that I don't have to even listen to the audio file.

Let me know how you make out!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!