Google has been speaking in different tongues with its voice strategy, but there are signs that its ambitions in telephony are coming into focus.
Last night, it unveiled Google Voice - a rebranding of GrandCentral, bought in July 2007. The company usually takes a long time reworking its acquisitions, some of them never reappearing at all, so the nearly two years it has spent on GrandCentral seems par for the course.
The original product offered users one telephone number to give out, replacing the usual three of mobile, office and home. Through a web interface, users set up caller groups of friends, family, co-workers and “other” that determined which phones rang in which order and which voicemail message was played out if the user did not answer. Calls could also be recorded.
Google Voice adds some new features - text messaging, voicemail transcription and a new Gmail-like interface that makes it easier to search and keep tabs on calls. It also promises a more robust service, free of the outages of the past.
Google had frozen membership of the service since acquisition and Voice will not be available for a few weeks to new users, and then only in North America, it appears.
Prospective users may also have privacy concerns about Google holding transcripts of messages and recordings of conversations, as well as all the other data it collects on their habits.
Google also has Chat, an instant messaging application, and Talk, which adds video and Voice-over-Internet Protocol calls. Both have been combined in its Gmail webmail application and it seems logical that Voice, a free service apart from charges for making international calls, will be integrated with all three.
Google Voice will also work on cell phone interfaces (where Google has introduced voice search for the iPhone), so integration with its Android operating system will happen as well.
Unified communications is shaping into a big battle between companies such as Cisco, IBM and Microsoft for major business customers. Google could be a competitor in the enterprise as well. It is starting with the individual consumer, competing with Ebay’s Skype, but its route to businesses through its Google Apps suite of online applications is already a well beaten path.
Others should be worried as well – Google’s combination of its software, its network of data centres and its marketing of its services to its huge audience could challenge business models in both emerging and traditional telecoms sectors.
