14 DAY TRIAL // Google has talked about the importance of enabling users to take their data with them out of any web service or site. Many services aim to keep people using them by making it hard or impossible to export all of the things they've created over the years.
"At Google, we believe that our users should be able to export any data that they create in (or import into) one of our many products, and we've created a project called Google Takeout to make this process as easy as possible," Anthony Jawad, software engineer, explained.
While Google is not exactly perfect, it's one of the companies with the best track record when it comes to exporting data and the latest effort is a centralized tool to enable users get as many things from Google as possible.
Dubbed Google Takeout, the tool now supports Google Voice data, the company announced. Users will now be able to take with them everything they may have stored with Google Voice, call history, saved voicemail and so on.
"We're happy to announce that Google Voice is the latest product available for Google Takeout," Jawad said.
"This means that all of the data associated with your Google Voice account, from your call history to voicemail messages, greetings and call recordings, is now available for download," he explained.
"Voicemail messages and greetings are exported as mp3s, text messages as microformatted html, and forwarding phone numbers as a vcard," he added.
The tool has been around for a month or so, but only enabled users to retrieve their Buzz posts, Picasa images and data from Google+ and their profiles.
With the addition of Google Voice data, the tool is starting to take shape, but there are plenty of things that could be added. Google's Data Liberation Front is working on it, as you can see from the funny video below.