Tech Table Radio Show

Tech Table
Wednesday, June 18, 2014

June 18, 2014

Justin: Welcome to MPA’s Tech Table. I’m Justin.

Diana: And I’m Diana.

Justin: And we’re your hosts. We’ll be serving up a heaping spoonful of all things tech.

Diana: We promise it will be easy to digest. Hello there, Justin.

Justin: Hey, Diana. It’s Wednesday, Web Wednesday, here on the Tech Table.

Diana: Web Wednesday.

Justin: We’re going to talk about Google Voice and Google Hangouts. I just like to say Google.

Diana: Google. Google.

Justin: Yeah. If you think about it, it’s a very strange word, which is the point.

Diana: Yeah. Well you know what it means. Do you know what a Google is?

Justin: No.

Diana: A Google is a number. It’s a number with a thousand zeros or a hundred zeros. Oh boy.

Justin: You should look this up before you start talking about it on air.

Diana: I think it’s a hundred zeros.

Justin: A hundred zeros.

Diana: It’s like a really big number.

Justin: That’s too many zeros for me to worry about.

Diana: I learned it in like elementary school.

Justin: That’s good. I learned Google plex and things like that, right?

Diana: I don’t know that.

Justin: Oh, yeah. That’s a number thing too I believe.

Diana: Huh. Hmm.

Justin: Yeah, like a billion Google plex.

Diana: See, there you go.

Justin: That’s what we used to say. I don’t know what it means. We might have a mathematician out there that’s like rolling their eyes and tapping their head on the steering wheel of their car.

Diana: They just need to just keep… Stick with tech, okay.

Justin: Exactly. We are going to talk about Google Voice and Google Hangouts today.

Diana: Yes, I use these regularly.

Justin: I don’t use Google Voice. I’ve used Hangouts before. So, what’s Google Voice, Diana?

Diana: Well, Google Voice is a service that lets you get a second phone number for your cell phone.

Justin: Right. That’s true.

Diana: This comes in to play for people that maybe don’t want to give out their actual phone number, maybe business phones.

Justin: Right. Exactly. Celebrities use these.

Diana: The people in the entertainment business. Yes, so if you don’t want to give out your actual phone number you can give out the second number and then better screen your calls.

Justin: Right. So how do you get a Google Voice number?

Diana: You can go to your Google account. You have to have a gmail account set up but shouldn’t we all by now anyway?

Justin: Well, I would think so.

Diana: There’s all sorts of apps that come along with your Google account. You can access those apps by clicking, it looks like, I think its nine little boxes up in the upper right hand corner.

Justin: Yes, that’s true.

Diana: If you click that there’s a drop down menu and if it doesn’t show up automatically as an available app right there, which it probably won’t if you’ve never used it before, you can select more and then more items, of course, will show up and you’ll see one that’s Google Voice. You can pick your number essentially. It’s not totally fair game but you can enter in suggestions that you might be interested in so its easy to remember, something similar to your own number or very different. You can also listen to your voice mails through the website and you can see your texts show up through the website.

Justin: Through what website, Diana?

Diana: Google. Accessing your Google Voice.

Justin: How interesting. But they have to be texts sent to that…

Diana: To that number, correct.

Justin: Yeah, so Google Voice is helping us all be incognito if we wanted to be. They have the incognito window and now they’ve got this.

Diana: Yep. So you can send and receive text messages, unlimited for free.

Justin: Absolutely. So, what about Google Hangouts?

Diana: Google Hangouts is really cool. It’s kind of like Skype.

Justin: Right, it is kind of like Skype.

Diana: Video chat.

Justin: I think it works better. It’s video chatting. We’ve used it for meetings and things like that before with our team members if we’re on the road and they’re back home we do a Google Hangout. We’ll talk more about that in an upcoming episode of Tech Table.

Diana: Yes, we can talk much more about Google Hangouts. And then one other thing I wanted to mention about Google Voice is it can actually transcribe your voicemail so that you can read it rather than listen to it too.4

Justin: That’s cool.

Diana: Yeah.

Justin: Very cool. All right. Well, that’s a little bit about Google Voice. We’ll talk more about Google Hangouts at another time. We kind of ran out of time today.

Diana: Yes, we did.

Justin: Until next time…

Diana: Take care.

Justin: Tech Table is brought to you by MPA of Bloomfield, Iowa, and God’s Country Radio. You can visit us online at askmpa.com.

Diana: If you have questions or comments, please send them to questions@askmpa.com. That’s questions@askmpa.com.

Justin: And thinks for listening.