since they acquired it and it works great for me:) Don
Google Voice: Rewiring your phone service
By Stephen Shankland CNET News
Posted on ZDNet News: Mar 12, 2009 5:23:43 AM
SAN FRANCISCO--Google plans to unveil a service called Google Voice on
Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone
communications what companies such as Yahoo have done with e-mail.
Google Voice, the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google
acquired in July 2007, has the potential to make the search giant a
middleman in an important part of people's lives, telephone
communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number
from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual
phones a person uses and handle voice mail.
The old version could let people centralize telephone services, screen
their calls, and listen to voice mail over the Web. But the new version
offers several significant new features, though. Google now uses its
speech-to-text technology to transcribe voice mail, making it possible
to search for particular words. Gmail's contacts now is used to instruct
Google Voice how to treat various callers. And Google Voice now can send
and receive SMS text messages and set up conference calls.
Existing GrandCentral users should get the option to upgrade Thursday,
and Google plans to offer it to the public after "a number of weeks,"
said Craig Walker, product manager of real-time communications and head
of Google Voice.
As interesting as the service itself, perhaps, is that Google plans to
offer it at no cost. Google is in the midst of a profitability push,
trying to wring more money from existing sites, adding advertisements to
properties such as Google Maps, Finance, and News that previously lacked
them, and canceling many projects such as Google Lively that didn't pass
financial muster.
With Google Voice, though, the company is showing more of its earlier,
more patient approach.
"Our goal is to be able to offer it to people for free," Walker said in
an interview at Google's offices here. Asked what the revenue model is
for Google Voice, he offered only an indirect answer: "Let's get a bunch
of happy users engaged in Google properties and getting their voice mail
through this. Google gets value out of having happy Google users."
Money isn't completely absent from the picture. The company does charge
for international calls, and it wouldn't rule out advertising in the future.
GrandCentral has appeared largely dormant from the outside since the
Google acquisition, leading some to spotlight it as an example of a
promising technology that was squelched by an acquisition. But, Walker
said, there was plenty of work going on behind the scenes.
"In addition to innovation, there's been a process of getting migrated
and integrating with the Google infrastructure," he said.
One big possible difficulty for people could be the issue of changing
phone numbers. People's phone numbers can form a piece of their
identity, in particular with home phone numbers held for years and
number portability making it possible for people to keep their mobile
phone numbers even if they change carriers. Even leaving aside the issue
of the hassle of changing phone numbers, sharing your Google Voice
number means committing your telephony to Google's services.
Another possible hitch is offering phone numbers that match where people
actually live or work. Here, Google hopes to have things under control,
though there were no numbers in the 415 area code for my test of the
service.
"Our goal is to offer numbers to virtually everyone who wants to sign
up. There are a finite number of numbers in the U.S., but we haven't
reached anywhere near depletion," Walker said. "We hope to have a pretty
good footprint (for area code choices) so that people will have really
good choices."
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-277942.html
Don
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