San Francisco — Search engine Goliath Google on Thursday intensified its push into the telephone market, announced the release of Google Voice, an application developed to provide a number of phone-related services that looks set to rival apps from Skype and Truphone,, including automated voice mail transcription and the consolidation of multiple user phone numbers into a single one. Google Voice is an upgraded version of GrandCentral, a service that Google acquired in 2007.
Google has been rapidly venturing out into new areas beyond its traditional search engine business, exploring everything from power management applications to health care pages, despite an economic downturn that has many companies rapidly consolidating around their core businesses.
Google Voice offers the ability to make free local and cheap international calls that are routed through the Internet and providing you with one number that receives any calls, whether they are to your home, work, or mobile number.
Furthermore, the service automatically transcribes voicemail messages into text and then send it your Gmail inbox or via SMS to your handset, so you read rather than listen to the voicemail. It will also offers the same function for any text messages you receive to you mobile phone.
“When you receive a voicemail Google Voice will automatically transcribe it into text so you can read what the voicemail is about,” Google said in an instructional video on the company blog.
“We will transcribe voicemails and convert it into text and put it in your inbox so that it is searchable and you will always have a record of that voicemail,” said Craig Walker, now group product manager for real time communications at Google and co-founder of GrandCentral — the telephone company Google acquired in 2007.
The company however gave a word of advice, that since the transcripts are “fully automated” through voice recognition technology, they “may include mistakes,” but we plan to make accuracy improvements over time,” said Google in a blog.
Google Voice is an upgraded version ebug of GrandCentral, a service that Mountain View, California, Internet company acquired in July 2007, and is currently available only to existing US subsebug cribers to telephone company GrandCentral.
“If you are already subscribed to GrandCentral, then over the next couple of days, you will receive instructions in your GrandCentral in-box on how to start using Google Voice,” Craig Walker, Vincent Paquet and Wesley Chan, Google Voice product managers, wrote on Google’s corporate blog. “We will be opening it up to others soon, so if you would like to be notified when that happens, please send us your e-mail address.”
At the current time, Google Voice is being offered as a free service.
Google Voice offer similar benefits to a service recently launched by VoIP company Skype and Spinvox. The service enables Skype users to have voicemails sent to their Skype number converted into SMS and sent to their mobile phone.
GrandCentral offers a single telephone number for home, work, and mobile phones and a central voicemail inbox that can be accessed through the Web. It also allows for low-priced international calls over the Internet.
Google during the past year has been actively exploring ways to expand its revenue, almost all of which currently comes from Internet search advertising.
“Google is spreading out into all major areas of information technology: OS, apps, communications,” Roger Kay, an analyst with Endpoint Technologies Associates, said in an e-mail. “Voice is one more unifying tool that Google is using to make its offerings more appealing to a general audience.”
Recent moves include adding advertisements to Google properties such as Google News, Google Maps and Google Finance and to videos on YouTube, which Google purchased for 1.6 billion dollars in 2006.
Earlier this week, Google launched a test version of a new “interest-based” advertising system that shows ads targeted to Web surfers based on their previous online activities.
Kay added, “It is one more brick in the giant edifice that Google is assembling to garner a customer touch, from as high a proportion of all electronic transactions as possible.”