[fencepost]

My expectation of Google Voice going away has kept me from doing more with it or many other Google products; what's funny is that by showing even token effort they could easily turn me into a $5-10/month paying customer instead of one who actively avoids depending on anything Google.

As it is I'll keep paying my money to my lightly used long term online fax service and perhaps at some point I'll switch over to a paid SIP provider.

As for GOOG-411 isn't it pretty widely accepted that it was free to build up a large pool of voice data without the privacy concerns of using Google Voice customer voicemail? Its end was guaranteed once they had enough training data for minimum viable voice recognition - on the same kind of phone microphones even.

[gst]

I don't see a reason to not use Google Voice, after all it's easy to port the number somewhere else in case they shut down.