Can you reach me now? The search engine giant aims to change how we get telephone calls through its new Google Voice service.
Google Voice is a new, free service that aims to simplify and improve how we deal with phone calls and voice mail.
While targeted at individuals, it has implications and applications also for business use. People are highly mobile and are just as likely to be working on the road or at home as at the office. Today, personal cell phones and mobile devices are part of every professional’s communications system and most have at least three or four numbers where they might be reached at.
By getting a Google Voice phone number, you can customize your phone and voice-mail capabilities to match how you work and live. A Web-based interface lets you easily set up or change your preferences. I won’t take you through a complete rundown of the many features because you can easily find them (along with detailed demos, at Google.com/voice). I’d like to focus on what I view as the two key aspects.
Key features
First, Google lets you pick a local number anywhere in the U.S. When that number is dialed, you control when and how your calls are routed to your work, home, mobile or any other phones. You can have certain types of callers (such as friends, your boss, or family) routed to specific phones or even have all phones ring simultaneously until you pick one up or the call goes to voice mail. You can also further customize certain phones to ring or not ring on certain days and time ranges.
Second, notification of new voice mails can be sent to your e-mail address (including a link to listen to them) or via SMS to your cell phone. But if you’re like me and find voice mail inefficient and painful to wade through, you’ll enable the automatic transcription feature. This delivers a text copy of each message enabling you to quickly scan through many voicemails and extract the key information. The transcription isn’t always perfect, but the quality is good enough for the task and you can listen to the original recording if necessary.
Roman Lubynsky is a technology consultant based in Boston. A frequent speaker and writer on technology topics, he has an MS in Management of Technology from MIT. Roman can be reached at [email protected]
Among the many additional capabilities:
• Conference calling—you can easily add up to four people to any call by having them dial into your GVoice phone number.
• Call recording—you can easily record any call and save the audio file.
• And unlimited free long distance calls within the U.S.
Not that all this stuff is new; company PBXs and VOIP providers like Vonage also offer similar capabilities. But the unified messaging space has been fairly quiet for several years with little new innovation.
Relaunch
Google Voice is the relaunch of GrandCentral, a company they acquired a couple of years ago. Like most of their acquisitions, Google has retooled the product from the ground up. And also typical of new Google services, there are some rough edges and gaps which will be resolved over time with new versions.
The biggest hole for me is that the service can’t yet handle incoming faxes. I’d like those to be received and forwarded to my e-mail as PDFs. Also, some people might be concerned about Google tracking and storing information about phone usage along with their e-mail, search and browsing histories.
Just as Google changed the rules of the game in Web search, and then did the same for e-mail, we should expect that the company will have an equally large disruptive impact on phone service. And history also suggests that when Google enters a new market it drives considerable new innovation as competition heats up, and that’s always a good thing.
