Lost Your Cell Phone? Keep Your Voicemail

I recently misplaced my Samsung Blackjack cell phone and it went missing for days. 

After reconstructing the disappearance, it eventually was found by a friend, but I had to endure a week without a phone before I could get it back.

One of the largest issues besides not having a phone to make outbound calls on demand when I’m out and about was the fact that I get tons of business and personal calls on my cell phone directly (vs. home #).  And retreiving voicemails can be a pain in the neck – calling my phone each time, multiple times a day, logging into the voice mail system, checking to see if there are new messages, etc.

But I remembered a great website that I used for my VoIP Vonage line that I could use for my cell phone as well to solve this problem . . .

GotVoice.com offers a service that consolidates your voicemail box.  One of the neat features is that it will auto-retreive your voicemails from multiple phones and allow you to check all of them in one place.  It works with VoIP broadband phone services like Vonage as well as most cell phone carriers like AT&T Wireless which I use.

After simply registering your phone, carrier/phone service and voicemail PIN, it goes out and checks your voicemail (without calling that number and ringing the line) in the background a couple of times a day.  You can set-up email notifications so that you are notified about new voicemail to check.

Now you don’t have to check voicemail until GotVoice.com tells you that you have one!  No more wasted dialing for nothing.  In addition, a copy of your voicemails are stored in your account just like an email account so that you can save important messages for later replay.  They even have a voice-to-text transcription service so that you can get visual voicemail to read like email.

Aside from changing my outgoing greeting on my lost cell phone for the time being to let people know how to reach me in the interim, I was able to retrieve messages in a timely manner without loosing the ability to respond to semi-urgent issues.  GotVoice kept me in the loop for all my phones.