While Apple does things with a fanfare and a multi million dollar adspend, Google tends to do things quietly. This week, through the announcement of simple changes to its GrandCentral support plan, it has quietly re-invented voice.
We always said that Skype should have been invented by Google, but this is far more radical than just free internet based VoIP. The moves are based around the company that Google bought back in June 2007 called GrandCentral, and it has been quietly working on revolutionized voice for the past couple of years. Perhaps Google at the time was responding to the way eBay bought Skype. Anyhow it is now ready with a bigger vision for GrandCentral, initially for US users only, but likely to be global as soon as it can manage to roll it out. The service is called Google Voice.
Google Voice is a set of services, controlled from a web interface, which when you think about them, you annot imagine why fixed line operators have never introduced years ago. First off you can have a single number (your Google number) for all of your phones, fixed or mobile, and you just tell it which one to route the call to at any point in time with a couple of clicks.
Voicemail works the same way, a single voicemail which you can access from your mobile, home phone or PC. You can even chose to see voice messages converted into text.
The system has call screening and call blocking, and you can screen out unwanted sales calls (especially from people that block their call identities) and set up conference calls and the system offers free calling (like Skype) to US phone lines (from the US presumably using existing Google backbones and servers). This idea could put most Voice over IP businesses like Vonage out of business, and more than upset a number of fixed line operators.
Google Voice is currently available for GrandCentral users only, but will be open to new users soon and Google is asking for people to leave an email address if they want to sign up for it. Google says they will be switched on in a couple of weeks, after it has upgraded Grand Central users to Google Voice. The service is free
Features include Call screening, which announces callers and something called Listen In, the ability to Listen first before taking a call. Google Voice lets you store SMS messages online, and let’s you choose which phone rings, based on who calls you. It also allows a different greeting for each person who calls, so you can tell your bank manager you’ve left the country and your girlfriend that you will drop everything and call back.
Google voice will even allow voicemails to be shared with other people or be forwarded (‘Guess what Jim said to me, I’ll send it to you, it’s so funny’). But of course for that to work, it must first be recorded, so Google Voice will record any phone message or any conference call.
It has its own conference calling system which works on the principle of using the internet to connect speakers on a free conference bridge, but where the system calls your phone, not the other way around. Google voice will even allow you to switch phones during a call. We wonder if Google will also sell this to operators to co-brand around the world, or if it’s going to keep it to itself? And where and when, we wonder, will the extra advertising appear that will pay for it all.