Google is launching voice.google.com
Google is now making a bigger break into the mobile phone and online voice industry by launching their new Google Voice (voice.google.com) service. It looks pretty awesome with lots of features I always wanted with my phone service.
Best of all: it’s free.
I’ve been paying attention to Google Voice based on their Retweets on Twitter, and have been trying to get a chance to see if it is truly such a breakthrough product.
I remember when they were launching Gmail, it was a bit random for them to go into the email space when they were just strong at search and ads, while Yahoo and Hotmail were dominating the Email field. Now I can’t live without gmail.
After that, they took over the collaboration office software too with Google Docs. Obviously there are lots of projects that they failed at, but some are really just killer apps.
Now especially with the Google Phone and others, voice.google.com will likely become their next big hit, and I’m excited to see how they will do.
Features of voice.google.com
Check out these voice.google.com features:
- Call screening – Announce and screen callers
- Listen in – Listen before taking a call
- Block calls – Keep unwanted callers at bay
- SMS – Send, receive, and store SMS
- Place calls – Call US numbers for free
- Taking calls – Answer on any of your phones
- Phone routing – Phones ring based on who calls
- Forwarding phones – Add phones and decide which ring
- Voicemail transcripts – Read what your voicemail says
- Listen to voicemail – Check online or from your phone
- Notifications – Receive voicemails via email or SMS
- Personalize greeting – Vary greetings by caller
- Share voicemail – Forward or download voicemails
- Conference calling – Join people into a single call
- Call record – Record calls and store them online
- Call switch – Switch phones during a call
- Mobile site – View your inbox from your mobile
- GOOG-411 – Check directory assistance
- Manage groups – Set preferences by group
voice.google.com only available for GrandCentral users
Unfortunately, when they launch in a few weeks, they will only be available to GrandCentral (a phone management service bought by Google) users.
It seems like they are treating this like Google Wifi, where at the beginning as an experiment, Google opened up free wifi to all residents in Mountain View to see if free internet results in more ad-words clicking revenue from that area.
Will update this post as soon as I get more info from voice.google.com
This is a pretty new product, and there’s not a lot out there yet. I will update this post as soon as I hear more about it.
