When Google acquired Skype competitor Gizmo5 in November 2009 it wasn’t much of a stretch to anticipate a soft phone application for Google Voice to be coming soon. A few months later we heard that Google was dogfooding Google Voice Desktop internally. But then last month we learned that Google was delaying any launch of the product, and may be scrapping it entirely, because Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin don’t want Google to be in the business of creating software outside of the browser.
We’ve asked our sources for screen shots of what Google Voice Desktop looks like. We didn’t get those, but we did get something better – the actual application. We’ve taken a video (above) showing what the application looks like, showing both outbound and inbound calls. This is mostly still branded Gizmo5, although the sign up screen says “Gizmo5 by Google,” and it is fully integrated with the Google Voice service, address book, etc. The Desktop application was also automatically added as one of my phones in the Google Voice for the browser. We don’t know if this is the current internal release or something more dated.
Video and more screenshots are below: → Read More
When Google launches new services, they often gets a lot of hype (see: Wave, Buzz). Unfortunately, they don’t always live up to that hype (see: Wave, Buzz). But one service that Google launched last year definitely has: Google Voice. Sadly, it has only been open to those with invites. But starting today, it is open to all.
Google Voice started as GrandCentral, a startup launched in 2006 to revolutionize phone management on the web. Google quickly snapped it up in 2007 for over $50 million. For the next two years, it went through a metamorphosis. During that time, some wondered if it was yet another service that Google bought and let die. But in 2009, it emerged as the Google Voice butterfly. → Read More
Google is adopting an Apple strategy today. The search giant is giving students priority to its invite-only phone service, Google Voice. Clearly, Google is trying to go after impressionable minds to gain early adopters of their technologies, which is something that Apple has been doing with its products for some time. The company implemented a similar strategy with Google Apps and Google Wave. The college student market is key because that’s where many people get trained, start relying on, and form brand allegiances to apps and technologies.
Google naturally believes the features of Voice, including the integration of Voice with email, free text messages and the ability to read voicemail in a transcript form are ideal for students and their lifestyle. Of course, this claim isn’t off base but I think those features are useful for anyone, which is why we find the service compelling overall. → Read More
Voice mail is a pain, but it doesn’t have to be. Just ask the million users who’ve now registered for YouMail, a ‘digital secretary’ type service that offers visual voice mail, smart filtering, voice-to-text transcriptions and custom greetings.
YouMail, which operates only in the United States, says it has not only surpassed the 1 million registered users mark but has also handled over 300 million calls since its inception in 2007. → Read More
Last September, while the Apple/Google Voice fiasco was still in full swing, an interesting application called Line2 was allowed into the App Store. The application acts as a mix between Google Voice and Skype, allowing small businesses to add a separate, dedicated business line to their iPhones in addition to the phone’s “regular” number. The service also includes features like conference calling, auto-attendant, advanced call management, and more. And today, Line2 is getting an update that makes the app “dual mode”, allowing it to handle both inbound and outbound calls over cellular voice networks, 3G data or WiFi (mostly) seamlessly. You can download the application here.
CEO Peter Sisson says that this is the first iPhone application that lets you use one phone number for both inbound and outbound calls over both WiFi and cellular networks on AT&T. So what does that mean? If you’re one of the millions of iPhone users who has to deal with AT&T’s shoddy network, Line2 can now intelligently receive a call over WiFi when it’s available (you don’t have to manually instruct the app to use WiFi — it will do it automatically). And if you leave your WFi network during the call, the phone can automatically switch to 3G. → Read More
Google Voice is a great service, one of the best things Google has released in a long time. Unfortunately, most casual web users have no idea what it is. Or more specifically, what its purpose is. And in fact, there’s even still some confusion amongst heavy web users about whether Voice is VoIP, for example (it’s not — yet). So Google has today launched a series of videos to explain the service.
The first (embedded below) is a simple overview, “What is Google Voice.” The 11 others go into more detail about actual features such as the mobile app (as in, the one that actually works on the iPhone), how to block callers, sharing voicemails, personalized greetings, and connecting all your numbers to your one Google Voice numbers, among other things. You can find them all on this new YouTube page that Google has created (just in case you thought Microsoft were the only ones using YouTube for product promotion). → Read More
[Spain] With the rise of consumer-facing cloud telephone services, such as Google Voice and Ribbit, the call management services of traditional mobile operators are starting to look a bit long in the tooth. How long, therefore, before they roll out rival offerings of their own?
Not long, hopes Spanish MVNO fonYou, which today announced that it will begin licensing its Online Mobile Telephony solution to mobile network operators. → Read More
Computer voice-to-text technology has come a long way, and every time it gets better, new applications open up. It is still not 100 percent accurate. Hell, it’s not even 90 percent accurate. But it is accurate enough for automated voicemail transcription services to become increasingly available and good enough not to have to listen through 15 voicemails to get the gist of what they are about. Of course, voicemails are often translated incorrectly, sometimes to comic effect.
In a study comparing the accuracy of four different voice-to-text technologies (Google Voice, Preview in Microsoft Exchange, Ditech’s PhoneTag, and Yap) the one which came out on top was PhoneTag, which is now part of Ditech Networks. PhoneTag showed an 86 percent accuracy rate in translating 500 spoken messages into text. Google Voice was only able to achieve an 82 percent accuracy in its voice-to-text translations. The study only evaluated purely automated voice-to-text systems. Here’s how all four fared: → Read More
Remember the dustup last summer over Apple’s rejection of the Google Voice app for the iPhone? Everyone was pointing fingers and even the FCC got involved. Michael was so upset that he quit the iPhone rather than give up his Google Voice. Well, now he can come back because Google Voice is finally on the iPhone via its browser, and Apple can’t really do anything about it..
Google Voice will become available today for both the iPhone and Palm Pre/Pixi via a new mobile Website which will go live later today at http://m.google.com/voice. The new Google Voice mobile site shows your inbox with transcribed calls, which you can play from the browser. You can also send SMS messages or dial from the browser. The application ends up making a local call through your cell phone to Google Voice, which then routes your call through its own lines. When someone gets the call, they see your Google Voice number instead of your AT&T number. And when you get a voicemail, a notification even pops up on your iPhone with the transcribed message (through SMS). → Read More
Just about two years ago, we wrote about Google giving away free voicemail accounts to homeless people in San Francisco. While a very nice thing to do, it was also a bit of marketing genius by both Google and SF mayor Gavin Newsom. After all, they were getting great publicity for giving away something that was already free (GrandCentral — which is now known as Google Voice). We wondered if they wouldn’t pull the same stunt in the future. Well, it’s the future; and they are.
Again, this is actually a very nice thing they’re doing, but it’s also an ingenious way to promote what Google clearly considers to be one of its killer products: Google Voice. This time, they’re giving out Google Voice accounts to U.S. veterans in Washington D.C. as an extension of their Project CARE program. This Saturday, Google is joining a dozen or so other Washington D.C. organizations at an event at the D.C. Veterans Affairs Medical Center to hand out Project CARE cards that will give veterans a unique Google Voice phone number and voicemail account. → Read More
Last summer, when Apple pulled third-party Google Voice applications from the App Store, one of them was VoiceCentral. Apple’s subsequent rejection of the official Google Voice app spurred an FCC investigation, but Google Voice never made it to the app store and none of the other apps ever made it back in.
Well, that’s not stopping the developers Riverturn, the company behind VoiceCentral. They are bringing back their app to the iPhone via the browser. They call it the Black Swan edition. You can get on a waiting list to be on the private beta here. The app is completely browser-based but has the look and feel of a regular app, complete with a dialer, list of transcribed voicemails, and SMS messages. → Read More
GrandCentral, which Google acquired in 2007, relaunched as Google Voice way back in March. It’s still technically in private beta, but invitations aren’t all that hard to find.
From what we’ve heard, Google is very seriously planning to add a version of the Google Voice product to its Apps/Office suite of applications for businesses. Currently, businesses are offered enterprise versions of Google Docs (online Office), Gmail, calendar and other applications. More than 2 million businesses and 20 million people use Google Apps.
Google Voice gives users a phone number that they can then redirect to any phone – mobile, landline, VoIP, etc. My Google Voice number rings my home Vonage line and multiple mobile phones simultaneously. And the Android Google Voice application effectively takes over the phone for all outbound calls and text messages, too.
The consumer service will supposedly launch publicly sometime early next year. But an enterprise version, which will act as a virtual phone system for small businesses, may come soon after. → Read More
Ever since Ribbit Mobile launched, I’ve been using it to forward my calls to Skype when I am at my computer and transcribe all of my voicemails, the text of which are then sent to me via email. It’s similar to Google Voice (which Mike uses), except you can use your existing mobile number. So I was pretty excited to hear that Ribbit Mobile now has an iPhone app which was just approved today (iTunes link).
I was also pretty surprised. Because Apple wouldn’t approve the iPhone app for Google Voice, which led to an FCC investigation last summer. The main reason Apple gave was because Google Voice substituted its own dialer for the iPhone’s native dialer, and this changed one of the iPhone’s core user interfaces. Well, suffice it to say that Ribbit Mobile does not attempt to take over any of the iPhone’s telephone functions. → Read More
Google Voice was GrandCentral before Google acquired that company back in 2007. Like most Google acquisitions it took a long time to fully rebuild the service on Google’s infrastructure, and even today Google Voice is still in private beta.
But lots of changes are coming. Google Voice should roll out publicly shortly. Users may be able to port their existing phone numbers to Google if they choose. Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 will give the service a client soft phone plus enhanced VoIP capabilities. And who knows what part Google Voice will play in in the upcoming Google Phone.
So a little housekeeping is in order. And the first item on the checklist is to shut down the GrandCentral website on December 31, 2009. Users were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but old GrandCentral messages are still on the old site. So if you want to keep them, Google suggests you download them soon.
The email: → Read More
I’ve had a nagging frustration in my otherwise perfect relationship with Google Voice. The service systematically replaces my friend’s phone numbers with their Google Voice numbers when they call, even when they aren’t calling from Google Voice. Not only has this led to a lot of confusing and time wasting “how did you get my Google Voice phone number?” conversations, it is a clear violation of Google’s own privacy policy.
Here’s how this works: Let’s say you signed up for Google Voice sometime in the past. The main benefit of Google Voice is that it forwards calls to your other phones – the whole “one number for life” thing. So you probably told Google Voice a few of your other phone numbers – home, work, mobile, etc. And then perhaps you stopped using the service after testing it.
Now if you call my Google Voice number from any of those real phone numbers that you told Google about, the caller ID and archived information on Google Voice (missed and received calls, voicemails) says your Google Voice number, not the number you are calling from.
That creates confusion. If I have your mobile number stored in my phone, it doesn’t recognize the Google Voice caller ID and I tend to ignore the call. Then I read the transcribed voicemail and realize it’s someone I know. I check my address book and the number isn’t right, though. I add the new number and maybe delete the old one, thinking you’ve changed phones. It’s a mess.
Inbound text messages have the same problem. And if I return the text message and you don’t have the feature turned on to your real mobile phone, you won’t get them. Or at least I think this is what happens. It’s all very confusing. → Read More
Earlier this week we broke the story about Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5. Today Google announced the deal on the Google Voice blog.
They aren’t saying much other than that the Gizmo5 team will join the Google Voice team, and that new Gizmo5 signups will be disabled.
One thing this gives Google – a much needed soft phone on the desktop for users to make calls through Google Voice. And integration with Google Talk is likely as well, which will let users of that service access the normal telephone system for inbound and outbound calls.
All in all this pits Google Voice nicely against Skype, which was also looking to buy the company. From the blog post: → Read More
Last month Skype was in talks to acquire VoIP startup Gizmo5. It was a perfect backup plan in case all that IP litigation didn’t work out. – Gizmo5′s SIP infrastructure could theoretically replace Skype’s proprietary P2P back end.
After the Skype settlement, though, Gizmo5′s strategic value to Skype sort of plummeted. In the meantime, Google bought them, say multiple sources with knowledge of the deal, for around $30 million in cash. The deal is done, say our sources, and will be announced shortly.
Gizmo5 is a good fit with a number of Google products. Google Talk allows voice calls between users but has no PSTN link to allow incoming or outbound calls to real phones. Gizmo5 does this well already.
And Google Voice is a great VoIP and phone identity service, but they have no endpoint for calls. Gizmo5, which by the way already integrates with Google Voice, is a soft phone end point for Google phone users. In other words, you will be able to make and receive calls to your Google Voice phone number from your computer.
This looks to me like Gizmo5 will be the glue that puts Google Voice and Google Talk together into a single product. And that product looks a lot like a Skype competitor. → Read More
If you are a tech lover, there is nothing quite like the launch day of a much hyped new gadget. Expectations run high. And since those expectations are rarely satisfied once you have the special little device in hand, it’s a moment to savor. In the hours before you own it, that device is perfect in every way. It will make you happier, a better person. There are no bugs, there are only features. It is whatever you want it to be.
Launch day of a new cool gadget is the closest thing to being a kid again on Christmas day (or whatever your winter solstice holiday of choice). You’ve anticipated the day. You’ve called in sick to work. And you are standing out in the freezing cold at 7 in the morning, hoping your place in line assures you a device before the carefully-planned sell out occurs. You’ve worked yourself into…a Fever Pitch.
I’ve always been let down with the real world gadget after that high of anticipation. But that’s ok. It’s part of the cycle of tech.
Today is Droid day. In just a few hours Verizon stores will open and the first customers will get their hands on their very own Droid.
And I promise you, if you are one of the people waiting in line, you will have a much lower than average amount of letdown. That’s because, in my humble opinion, the Droid is the coolest mobile phone to exist to date. It is as close as we’ve come to the Platonic ideal of a smartphone. It’s very existence ensures that the next iPhone will be even better than it otherwise would have been. Competition is good.
Yes, this is an unabashed love letter to the Droid. If you want the dispassionate reviews, we’ve got em. And then some. That isn’t what this post is about. → Read More
First, there was Google Voice. And all was good, and not so good. But it showed that there is a better way to manage voicemails than to listen to 15 in a row just to get to the one you care about.
Now, there is an alternative to Google Voice called Ribbit Mobile. And it too is very good. Ribbit Mobile is in private beta, but the first 500 people to sign up with the invite code “techcrunch” will jump to the front of the line. → Read More
If you’re a Google Voice user like me, you’ll be glad to print out this quick reference card that gives you all the menu options when you call the service to listen to voicemail or change settings, or receive calls.
For example, when you receive a call with Google Voice you can hear who’s calling before you answer. Hit 1 to answer the call, or hit 2 to send them to voicemail. Easy to remember. But you can also hit 3 to send them to voicemail and listen in. Or 4 to answer the call and record it. Four is too many things for me to remember, which is why I’m printing this out and putting it in my wallet.
Thanks for CoolGeex for creating this! → Read More
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