Google Voice is a very promising product and the hype around it is warranted. Now, you can try it out for yourself, as Google has opened the service to everyone, everyone in the US at least. Google Voice is a complementary service, which improves the regular phone communication we’re all used to. Until now, signing up for it required an invitation, though it already has over one million users. You can read more about it and about the
announcement here.
It’s a great tool, but Google is just getting started. For now, you still need to have a phone service and an actual phone to use Voice, but that may change soon enough when and if Google integrates Voice with its existing VoIP services and web apps to create a standalone voice-communication service.
“A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications... Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required,” Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, Google Voice product managers,
announced.
“We’re proud of the progress we’ve made with Google Voice over the last few years, and we’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible when you combine your regular phone service with the latest web technology,” they added. While the wording is as vague as it gets, it’s clear that Google has bigger ambitions for Voice.
Google hasn’t confirmed any plans to take Google Voice beyond being a great tool for a phone service, but
past moves by the company along with rumors coming from inside Google strongly suggest that it wants to
start competing with the phone companies.
It has acquired Gizmo5, maker of a desktop client for Google Talk and other communication services, and, according to rumors, Google has been working on a
standalone client software for Google Voice. Those plans
may have been scrapped, but a
softphone built into Gmail is likely still in the works.
Of course, offering VoIP services is not anything new, even you’ll have the possibility to call any phone number in the world from Gmail. Skype and several others have been doing it for years. But combined with what Voice already offers it makes for a very solid proposition.
The real challenge is getting a VoIP client on mobile phones and enabling it to work over the regular phone carrier’s service. This isn’t something that any carrier is going to like or allow, but, as luck would have it, Google owns its own mobile operating system, so it’s in a much better position to get its product on mobile phones. Carriers could block it, obviously, and Google can’t afford to take them head-on just yet. But its position is getting stronger and, if Android’s growth continues, Google will be a force to reckon with a year from now or even sooner.
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