Google announced on Wednesday of an integration with Google Voice into Gmail. What exactly does this mean?
First it’s important that everyone be familiar with Google Voice and it’s features. Google Voice launched over a year ago as a beta program which was only available on an invitation only basis. On June 22, 2010 Google opened the doors for everyone to signup for Google Voice and provided a phone number which can be configured to ring all of your phones at once, whether it be your home, office, cell, etc. You can setup calls to forward to some or all of your phones and with restrictions given the time of day or day of week or groupings of contacts. You can even block calls from specific numbers.
The voicemail configuration is full featured and allows you setup and save multiple recordings for different contact groups. Think of the advantages and possibilities this enables. You can setup a greeting for your friends to hear that may be in a friendly or relaxed tone and a different greeting for family members, all while having a professional greeting for business contacts and unknown callers. In addition, you can have your voicemails sent to you email as an attachment and you can even have your voicemails transcribed to SMS text messages.
Google Voice offers call a screening feature which can require callers to announce their name and lets you listen as the caller leaves a message. There is also a “Do Not Disturb” feature where you can set the number of hours for the “Do Not Disturb” status it to last for.
Lastly, Google Voice offers a call widget that you can place on your website or blog. You can setup the widget to call you at any or all of your phones, have a custom greeting set and you can set call screening as well.
So far everything sounds great. You get a telephone number and a ton of options for inbound phone calls… but what about outbound calls?
Outbound calls can be made in several different ways. The first way is from your mobile phone. Android and BlackBerry phones can download an application from http://m.google.com/voice while iPhone, Palm WebOS, Nokia S60, and Windows phones will have to open a web browser and go to http://m.google.com/voice. I tested using my iPhone and after entering in my login information I was taken to a keypad dial as the main screen. Enter in a number and hit “Call” and I was prompted to accept the dialing of a different number. This different number is how Google connects my call to the number I originally dialed and sends my Google Voice number as the caller id to the person I am trying to get a hold of. After clicking the call “Call” button my call was connected and the person I called saw my Google Voice number as the caller id.
The next way to dial numbers using Google Voice is new with yesterday’s announcement of Google Voice integration with Gmail. As of yesterday, my Gmail now has an option labeled “Call phone” directly below my Google Chat status. After clicking this new item a phone keypad pops up and allows me to search for names or numbers in my contacts or the number directly. Using this method requires you to have on your laptop, or computer, a microphone and speakers. The call gets connected using your computer’s Internet connection. This is very similar to numerous other services, Skype being one of the largest names out there. However, Google Voice differs in that Google Voice is free to call not just other Google Voice subscribers but to any number in the US and Canada. In addition to free calls, Google Voice allows for text SMS messages to be sent and received at no cost as well.
How popular was Google Voice integration with Gmail on its first day of launch? According to a tweet from Google, users seem to love it and more than one millions calls were placed in the first day. Not too bad!
Following are some videos that go over the features. I hope you enjoy!
The call quality is excellent !!
So far so good! I’ve been very impressed!
Excellent post Tei!
Hey Tei
Can you set up the widgets section of our blogs to accept the Google Call widget? I would like to place on my sites.
All you need to do is add a text widget and paste in the code. I already tried and verified it works just fine