» Google Is the New VoIP Challenger

Google Is the New VoIP Challenger

As much as we dislike jumping on industry buzzwords like “Unified Communications” here at VoipSchool, Google’s acquisition of Grandcentral has made this trendy notion closer to a reality than it’s ever been. GrandCentral, the service that provided the popular “one number for life” service, will soon become Google’s “Google Voice” service. The interface that Google has created to manage voice functions has the same look and feel as their popular Gmail service, and does more to integrate the power of inbox search and management functions than just about any service.

For the moment, Google Voice is only available to a select few current Grand Central subscribers, but will soon be available to everyone. While a full breakdown of features is available on the about section of the site, here are some notes on what we thought were the coolest/scariest features.

Cool:

Voicemail Transcription: This service exists in some forms already for other services, but no other service incorporates the power of Google’s search engine. Google admits that the transcriptions aren’t perfectly accurate yet, but it has plans to make improvements in the future. What’s incredible is that all voicemails are saved in the same way that emails and conversation threads are saved in Gmail, with the ability to search for words that appear in the transcriptions, so you can find a voicemail just as you might search for a particular email in your inbox.

Cool/Scary:

Listen In: Many times we just don’t feel like taking a call, and send it to voicemail, only to check the voicemail immediately thereafter. Google Voice makes it possible to listen in as the voicemail is recorded, and even take the call at any point as the message is being recorded. In the days of answering machines it was common to get messages that began “Hey, if you’re there pick up . . .” but in today’s cellular world having someone pickup while leaving them a voicemail would be a bit of a surprise.

Scary:

On the flip side of the convenience of searching for any voicemail in your inbox is the ability to instantly embed it on a webpage, just as you might embed a youtube video on your blog. Perhaps Google is catering to the music community, after many hip hop recordings popularized the inclusion of phone message samples into songs, but for every day people like you and me this feature just seems like it’s inviting privacy violations, but I suppose that’s just the world we now live in.

Listen in and transcription features have been available for some time via independent companies that offer these features as add-on’s to your existing service. For the first time, Google has brought all these features under one roof and compiled what used to be peripheral features into one streamlined service.

Google’s acquisition of Grand Stream is nothing new, the deal took place in July 2007, but since that time there’s been little to no news; these new developments are a welcome surprise.

Some questions to consider: How does this change the VoIP landscape? Are there any interesting acquisition targets for google now that they are in this space? Who will this disrupt? How will they monetize this service? Is this going to affect their business apps?

Uncategorized | fbnewman | March 12, 2009 10:05 pm

2 Comments

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