Google Voice, Introduced…

Google has recently announced their Google Voice service. In their never ending efforts to keep the world meshed within the Google-sphere, it seems Google is now targeting your voice & SMS communications.
 

Currently, the service is only available for GrandCentral users but they plan to open up to new users soon and have a sign up form to notify you when this occurs. None of us here at Techronos are GrandCentral users, so we can’t yet give an in depth review, but here’s what we know so far about the features worth mentioning:

The Google Voice system revolves around the Google number that Google assigns you when signing up. They intend to offer numbers in all US area codes and rumors are brewing that you’ll be able to port over numbers that you already my own rights to through existing phone services. This number, which is an actual number people can dial, isn’t actually a phone line, but serves as a gateway to all your existing phone services (mobile, work, home, etc). Although it seems to be aimed at people who have multiple lines that need organizing, the service still offers some benefits to those with only one line.

Call Routing:
After you add all your phone lines to your service, you have the option to forward your google number to any of the lines. For example, I could set up my Google voice account with my cell phone, my home phone land line, and my office phone land line. When anyone calls my Google number, all phones would ring and I’d have the option of accepting the call from any line. Not a revolutionary feature on its own, but you can also define rules based routing on the incoming caller ID as well – Tim can’t bother you at work, Mom can reach you anywhere.
 

By default, when a Google call comes in, you are first greeted by the Google service telling you who’s calling and presents you with 4 options:

Call Presentation can be disabled. However, with call presentation turned off, the first phone that picks up will answer the call.  If a voicemail system picks up the call, any message left by the caller will not appear in your Google Voice inbox, and instead appear on the voicemail system that picked up the call (i.e. your home answering machine, your work voicemail system, etc.). You can turn off call presentation on a per contact basis in your Contacts list.

Voicemail/Call Log Management
Voicemail and Call Log management is part of the service that has me most interested.  Each Google Voice account has a web account that, from the screen shots and videos, looks like Google’s other services.  You have your Inbox, History, Spam, Trash bins.  You also have Voicemail, SMS, Recordings, and Call Logs that are all indefinitely stored within Google’s system.

The systems voicemail features all you’d expect from a normal voicemail service.  Additionally, Google Voice automatically transcribes (voice to text) your voicemails for you and displays them similar to email messages.  With each message you have the transcription to read (which can also be SMS texted to your phones), an MP3 audio recording of the message (downloadable), as well as caller contact info, date, time, etc.  It’s not exactly clear if these are going to link up to coordinate contacts within other Google Apps, but it’d seem stupid for them not too.
 

The main benefit to this system is that you can better manage your messages.  With options to save and folder, the ability to scrub through the recording as well as have a text transcription really makes it easy to archive important information.  Of course, this assumes you have a high amount of voicemail traffic – and while we all might think twice about leaving detailed messages on peoples voice services now, the advent of services such as Google Voice may make us change the way we think about voicemail.
 

Another interesting feature of the web service is the ability to initiate calls.  You can quickly jump through your contact list, select a contact, and have the service dial out.  Not only will the call come from the Google Number you’re assigned, your chosen device will also ring and initiate the connection for you.  Not extremely helpful to most people, but if you are desk bound and make a ton of calls a day, this may make the process a bit easier as well as log your actions throughout the day.
 

Similar to the voicemail management, Google Voice offers the same organizational tools for SMS texts.  With the ever increasing popularity of SMS, it’s no doubt that people are texting similar to their emailing habits, and having a way to organize this data is all the more helpful.
 

Also useful within the Web Service is the ability to SMS in reply to both SMS & Voicemail messages, all through the convenience of your PC.  Those of us who struggle to effectively type on their mobile devices can use their PC’s keyboard to type.  This would also be a great help to me when I receive text message while I’m at the office and don’t want to spend all day typing away at my BlackBerry in full site of my co-workers.
 

One obvious concern is the call quality since this is probably some sort of IP-Phone implementation, but according to Google:

“Google Voice works with regulated telephone carriers to connect your phone calls. We do extensive testing and monitoring of call quality with all of our carriers. Receiving or placing calls through Google Voice should not affect your call quality or reception. You should continue to get the same quality of calls that your currently get when using your underlying phones.”

Overall, Google Voice looks like an interesting service that could potentially help some people out.  Those of you who don’t have a ton of phone/SMS traffic would probably find the service entertaining at best.  If integration with all the Google Apps gets implemented, I think it could turn out to be very handy for a lot of people.  The obvious setback is re-acquainting everyone with your new Google Phone number until porting becomes possible.

For complete information and videos, check out the source:  http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html