Google Launch a Unified Comms Play

GrandCentral just became Google Voice. But really it's nothing to do with "voice" - it's about applications and services that surround it.

Over the last 10 years Google has become ubiquitous to the online lifestyle. It advises us on medical conditions, helps us convert currencies, find a holiday destination and seek out people and information.

So now Google is about to become a phone company.

We already knew that GrandCentral were rolling out something "new" across the major Google Datacenters. That could only really mean one thing - full integration into the product suite with single sign in. I have no doubt that's been a mamouth task. It explains why we've heard nothing from GrandCentral since they were purchased, and also why Google appeared to have given up on it by letting domains expire. The truth is they have no intention of keeping those domains long term anyway - GrandCentral 2.0 will be known as Google Voice.

If you analyse Googles current product set, it's easy to see the path that Google are on in becoming our all encompassing manager of online lifestyle:-

Google Docs
Google Maps
Google Lattitude
Google GMail
Google Talk (IM)

If we add some GrandCentral goodness to this set it's easy to see the play, which consists of the following:-

Basic voice services (telephony)
Visual Voicemail
SMS
Conference Calling

Integrate all of these applications together and you have a spectacular Unified Communications suite, all driven by the browser or your mobile device and wrapped into the GMail interface.

Of course the more that Google can put into text format the better they can integrate their core product - search. We know that Google have been experimenting with voice recognition (see Google Voice Search) and Mobivox have shown that this can work quite effectively with short messages. Voicemail with a speech to text engine is now integrated into GMail, together with SMS's received on your GrandCentral number. That makes your voice, SMS and eMail search a singular unified experience. It's also a useful thing for regulatory compliance (logging communications "trails").

Conference calling naturally fits in with the Google Docs system and shared workspaces. In fact, I can picture a virtual "desk" with documents and a phone on it, all inside a browser. Indications are also that this service will operate in a similar way to VoIP User - calls inbound and terminated to VoIP or voicemail would generate a credit you could use to make outbound calls.

Couple Google Lattitude to the presence engine in GTalk and, well, there's not much that's missing*.

Key question now is will Google Voice purchase Skype, or will they simply rely on their brand strength to compete with them head to head? At the moment, Skype are over the critical mass point with their subscribers. Last I heard was that GTalk had about 1.5m subs.

* - You also have to wonder whether, now they've dropped Jaiku, should Google buy Twitter ?

Reply from satphoneguy on Mar 13, 2009 - 01:17 AM

if i am not mistaken google voice is the very first VOIP service that can accept inbound SMS to your issued phone number. i hope this sets a new precedent. many different service allow sending of SMS and replies back. my problem has always been that if i give out a voip DID forwarded to my cell people are going to try to send SMS's to me via that number. now they can to my GC/GV #. hopefully this wil set a precedent and make VOIP SMS capabilities the norm.

Reply from andyk on Mar 13, 2009 - 02:21 AM

My account syas it isn't ready to be upgraded yet. I gather they're working their way through.

Any guesses on what they might have for UK users? Not possible to forward to a mobile unless the account is funded of course

Reply from dean on Mar 13, 2009 - 10:38 AM

Quote:

Any guesses on what they might have for UK users?

I think the feature set is likely to be the same, but:-

Quote:

Not possible to forward to a mobile unless the account is funded of course

Exactly, that's the problem. In the US the mobile networks are a "pay to receive" model which makes it a lot easier.

Reply from martyndavies on Mar 13, 2009 - 12:04 PM

My GrandCentral account is also not ready to be upgraded yet, but I did read somewhere that GV will be the same in that it is still restricted US numbers. I've often thought it would be a lot more useful with forwarding to a generic SIP account, but so far all they had was Gizmo, which doesn't quit cut it for me.

Reply from satphoneguy on Mar 13, 2009 - 12:52 PM

i have read that anyone trying to port over to the new service from an IP address outside of the US will lose there account.. it has always been a TOS violation for none US residents to open accounts; seems like they are now enforcing that. you could always login via a proxy though. the service itsef works fine from overseas once you get it ported.

Reply from andyk on Mar 13, 2009 - 01:42 PM

Quote:

it has always been a TOS violation for none US residents to open accounts; seems like they are now enforcing that. you could always login via a proxy though. the service itsef works fine from overseas once you get it ported.

I wasn't aware of that, and can't find it just at the moment.

The original invitation came to a ~.co.uk email address, and I set it up and recently logged in from UK IP addresses.

Reply from mazilo on Mar 13, 2009 - 05:52 PM

I played a bit with my GV account and did not find any SIP URI forwarding support, except to Gizmo5. Honestly, I am totally disappointed with GV, especially after Google hid its development for more than a year since it acquired GC. The new speech2text transcription really sucks, especially if it tries to transcribe a voicemail left by a human with ESL (English as a Second Language), let alone in language other than English Perhaps, Irish, German, Indian, etc. accent English will produce different transcripts! I had a friend leaving a Chinese message saying Hey, you're not home to pick up my call in Chinese and here (hey with global want to sunday morning hi no but go ahead and we'll okay thanks) is the transcript I got in English.

Reply from ianplain on Mar 13, 2009 - 07:22 PM

Hi

Quote:

The new speech2text transcription really sucks, especially if it tries to transcribe a voicemail left by a human with ESL

The Google voice rec is poor, the voice search for the Iphone couldnt even cope if you had English as a first language, But it was good for a laugh but thats about all it was good for.

Ian

Reply from satphoneguy on Mar 14, 2009 - 02:08 AM

wow. this is getting a ton of press. i have always felt grandcentral to be over hyped. i have been a regular user. but really only because it has been the way to get a free of charge did where i can pick any area code in USA. it seems to me most users have been with it either for the free calls or simply for a second phone number. as to whole purpose behind it; seems obvious to me that most people juggling around multiple phones(cell, home, business, etc.) would be much better served not by having one phone number ring 5 phones they do not need; a much better solution would be 5 phone numbers all ringing one phone(probably a cell phone) one number they would give family and friends, one business contacts, another potential telemarketers, etc.

Reply from gtoal on Mar 16, 2009 - 07:27 PM

Satphoneguy wrote:

Quote:

if i am not mistaken google voice is the very first VOIP service that can accept inbound SMS to your issued phone number. i hope this sets a new precedent. many different service allow sending of SMS and replies back. my problem has always been that if i give out a voip DID forwarded to my cell people are going to try to send SMS's to me via that number. now they can to my GC/GV #. hopefully this wil set a precedent and make VOIP SMS capabilities the norm.

Unfortunately I've hit two problems with this so far:

1) sending an SMS to a google number is OK from a cell phone, but not from many web pages which ask you to tell them the carrier to use. It'll take some time until Google fully interconnects with the various aggregators that such sites use as their outgoing SMS gateway.

2) The incoming SMS feature will be great when there's an API to access it (or even just a simple forward to email, where you can feed it into your own code via procmail etc on another system) *but* at the moment, the only way to get the SMS text is to scrape it off the web page :-/ The only forwarding they currently provide is to another SMS number. Chicken & egg...

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