Thoughts on Google Voice
Francis Turner
August 11th, 2009
Google Voice has been finally (re)launched in the typical google manner of a closed invite-only beta. This is similar to how Google released Gmail. This somewhat closed process, and the limited easy to find descriptions of how it all fits together don’t really help. However ars technica has published a nice overview article that explains what it does quite comprehensively. It doesn’t quite explain how things work on the outbound side - e.g. where Google Voice substitutes your Voice number for the number of the phone you are calling from in other people’s callerID systems - but it does explain the features and what they do.
For the most part these features sound like the ones you get from a very high-end PBX which has been outfitted with speech to text voicemail handling and a bunch of other bells and whistles. However Voice works for individuals not companies and it is, currently, free. Unless Google figures out a way to make users get ads on the system I don’t see how it can possibly remain free unless the purpose of Google Voice is to kill the voice revenue of major operators and/or the IP PBX market. However it is quite possibly a service that I would be willing to pay money for and I suspect others would too, hence I will not be at all surprised if Google starts offering monthly subscriptions.
One thing is for sure, it won’t fly well in Europe or many other places outside the USA. At least one of it’s major features - the ability to redirect calls to a cellphone - will cost google serious amounts of money since, outside the US, calls to cellphones are significantly higher than calls to landlines. On the other hand if Google offers a subscription model where the subscriber pays for cell phone minutes then it could end up finally killing the rip-off roaming charges that many mobile subscribers gripe about. All a traveller would need to do is buy a pre-pay SIM in his new country and tell Google to forward calls to that SIM.
All of the features seem to come from an Internet view of the phone system. Essentially Google Voice adds a layer of virtualization to the phone system so that users have one number but depending on their mood, who is calling etc., callers get different service - including a fake “this number out of service” message for people you really don’t want to talk to. One suspects it wouldn’t be too hard for Google to extend this so that call forwarding would include forwarding to/from VOIP services like GoogleTalk (or Skype).
Finally I have to say that some of the call-forwarding by group and voicemail features would actually be interesting for pure IP services. If Google Voice could add some kind of chat feature (i.e. integrate Google talk) then this would quite possibly kill Skype and many other IM applications.
Tags: Europe vs USA, google, VOIP