Google Voice Leaves Beta – Now Everyone Can Be Heard!

Jun 25

MikeGeneral Business Practices, Web Industry Google, google voice No Comments

In the last couple of days Google, Google has opened Google Voice to anyone in the U.S. looking for phone management on the web.  Until now it has only been available to a select few, since Google acquired the excellent Grand Central service back in 2007.  After launching Google Voice on a limited scale and shutting down Grand Central, Google went on to acquire the VoIP service Gizmo5, which it too shut down.  Because Google did seemingly nothing for sometime with regards to Google Voice its long term plans have at best been left to educated guesses, until now.

The Google Voice service which launched last year in Beta, has since undergone a metamorphosis and has emerged as a brilliant solution to online phone and voicemail management.  The SMS service works better and there is a Chrome extension which makes it easier to manage.  An account is still free if you have a Google log-in and you have a choice of keeping your existing number and upgrading it with voicemail.  If that doesn’t suit then you can set a new main number which will ring your cell, home and office phones, as well as your desktop VoIP. Gmail integration also gives users the ability to turn voicemail into emails.  International calls are cheap and future additions include number portability and no set-up web calling.

As a communications solution, especially where small businesses are concerned, it is simply brilliant and we have been using it for sometime now along with over 1 million others – a figure you can now expect to balloon thanks to this latest release.  Google themselves are delighted with the results particularly after the now infamous rejection by Apple of its Google Voice app (an episode that led Google to design their own mobile based web app).

Google have described the service as ‘the pinnacle of modern human communication’ and given all that it has to offer – I think they may be right!