The initial setup is very straightforward. GotVoice only needs a phone number and the appropriate PIN to access your voice mailboxes. GotVoice supports many of the most popular phone service providers whether the number is a cell phone, a landline voicemail service, or a VOIP provider; but they don’t yet support all of them.

Much like signing up for high speed internet in the old days there’s a vetting process where the service will verify your Telco provider’s eligibility and give a yay or nay. There’s no official list of all the supported services, but give it a shot. I had great luck with a Sprint PCS cell, and one reviewer reported that Verizon Wireless and home have worked fine.

GotVoice was designed to work with automated Telco systems and can check your home voicemail, but only if you’re using the services provided by your telephone provider. If you’re using an external answering machine then GotVoice won’t be able to check your messages.

There are four ways to check your messages with GotVoice. Their website has an interface for manually retrieving messages, and a flash based player for listening and downloading. All accounts have access to the web interface, and a great complement to the website is a handy Windows utility that runs in the system tray. The GotVoice Message Center can also be used to manually check for messages, jump straight to the account pages, and retrieve all the saved messages. If you really need to have your voicemail checked more than three times a day on the free account this is the easiest manual way.

The Plus ($4.95/month) and Premium ($9.95/month) plans both offer notification emails with the messages attached as heavily compressed mp3s. The file sizes are small and the audio quality is definitely good enough. The top tier of service offers a personalized RSS feed with all your messages; in my reader it showed up as a Podcast since all the messages were referencing audio files.

I've been using a Premium account, which lets me check my voicemail up to twenty-four times a day. The Plus account is limited to ten scheduled checks, and the free account to three daily. But your messages will always be available for manual retrieval if you so desire.

Custom schedules can be set up for those times outside the daily routine when you’ll have very limited access to a computer, or to make sure that your messages are checked before you walk into the office. The smartest move is to schedule checks for those times when you know that you’re available and can receive, sort, and listen to voicemail from all sources at once. The javascript interface is a simple affair to add different times for each day, or use the little green arrow to choose that time point across the entire week. GotVoice checks mail every thirty minutes either on the half or whole hour. Save multiple custom schedules and select between them at a moment’s notice. The system is very flexible, and the interface is nicely done.

I had to ask the powers that be about their message retention policy since it wasn’t covered in any of the GotVoice help files: There are no limits on the number of messages, and no limits on the total recorded time. That may change at some distant point in the future, but for the time being I’m holding onto every single message that I receive for archival purposes. This is the true beauty of their free service, and is going to get geeks of all kinds to sign up in droves.

Of all the things that GotVoice has done on this system, I only have a couple of very minor complaints. I carry a Treo, and I’ve had my entire contact list in a digital format for years. It’s really annoying to read “Message received from 314-361-9444.” I haven’t memorized a new phone number in years because they’re all in my little electronic wallet. At the very least we need a feature that lets me add names to a master contact list so I can see “Dr. Cupcake” instead of just a phone number.

Secondly their website needs a redesign, as a few functions are not very intuitive. For example, below the message list are buttons for “First, Next, Previous, etc.” When I started accumulating lots of messages, I just assumed that there were controls for playing the next message in sequence and that my old messages were being erased, but no, the buttons are for skipping to the next page of indexed messages. I felt like a moron, but I’m sure that I’m not the only one confused by unlabeled controls.

I enjoyed using GotVoice’s services quite a bit. I’ll be keeping a free account when my trial runs out, and if I really can’t live without the email and RSS features I’ll be paying for a premium account. I’ve liked the service, but more importantly I’ve found myself using it often. I’ve always wanted archival access to my voicemail messages, and now I have it.

If you’re an always on the go worker bee having to juggle multiple voicemail systems, then this service is a necessity. Give the free account a shot to test it out for yourself, but I’m already hooked.