At long last, I opened my GMail Inbox today (well, the label marked ‘Google’, actually) and was ecstatic to see an invite for Google Voice!

I’d applied for the Google Voice Invitation system a few months back when Google had officially announced it, and showcased all the different features that it would have. I thought it was a pretty nifty way to handle a Unified Communication System, although there’s still some way to go, and a lot of features to add!

What is Google Voice?

To put it in my own words (based on my opinion), Google Voice is Google’s attempt at the VOIP calling market and also for providing a Unified Communication Platform for consumers (and I’m pretty sure that after all the beta testing, for the Companies).

Google Voice provides you with an online phone number (presently, only US numbers). Whenever someone calls you on this Online Number (Let’s call it the GV Number, shall we?), the call is forwarded to all the phone numbers that you have added onto Google Voice, and you can answer the call with whichever phone is closest to you. This is a very useful feature for those busy execs who carry a number of phones with them for different purposes.

Google Voice also provides the online version of Visual Voicemail, and the killer feature here is Transcribed Messages. Whenever someone leaves a Voicemail, Google Voice does it’s best and tries to Transcribe the message to text. Why is that useful? Consider the following scenarios:

• If you are using a very slow internet connection, it can take ages for the voicemail to load and playback, but since the text is already there, you could just read the message without playing it back!
• If you are on a limited data plan, you’d rather not load the voice, and just read the text, less data used!

Google Voice also allows you to make International Calls.. For example, calls to India cost $0.07 at the moment. If you compare that to the International calling service used by many of the Indians that I know in the US (Reliance India Call), it’s pretty favorable! Reliance charges 6.9 cents per minute, while Google charges 7 cents a minute. I wonder if Reliance would feel threatened by this!

Other features include marking certain numbers are spam, customized greeting for each contact,and so on and so forth!

My first impressions after using Google Voice

Well, at first glance, it’s ‘GMail does Voicemail’! Look closer and you will see that you can make calls to any US number for free and send SMSs to US numbers for free too! Those of you who’ve been in touch with me over the last few months/weeks will know that I’ve recently moved back to India. But despite the move back, I still have a lot of dear friends back in the US. I’d love to be in contact with them, and I’d love it even more if I could do that for FREE !!

But, Google Voice will only redirect calls to US Phone Numbers at the moment, so what use is this for me? Well, luckily I have a Skype Online Number for the US, and I added that number to my Google Voice account. So, any call that I make first connects to my Skype number (and effectively to my Computer) and then connects me to the person I’m calling! Nice!!

Features I’d like to see

• I’d like to see more integration with GMail and Android especially! I have an Android phone and I’d love to be able to make voicecalls using Google Voice straight off the device! I’m pretty sure that’s not going to be an option for the iPhone (I have one of those too) since operators like AT&T would probably veto it!
• Options for adding International Numbers to your account. I know that Google would have to set up servers in these countries and also get VOIP licenses in each individual country for getting this to work, but this is a wish list!

Conclusion

All in all, I think Google Voice is a very useful tool, and as with all things Google, it’ll probably take the market by storm once it hits open subscription!

There’s still more features that people will ask for, and Google will probably deliver, but at it’s own pace and when it deems that things are on the right path!

Here’s hoping that Google’s entry into this arena will make the other competitors step up their game! Skype… you’ve been called out!