Google release Google Voice/GrandCentral 2

Great news today from two of my favorite guys in telecoms Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet the founders of GrandCentral.
“Here comes Google Voice”
I was there for the launch of GrandCentral at Etel and the speed of Google’s acquisition of them only confirmed my suspicion that this was a very clever application although I did get off to a shaky start on this, private joke but I am sure Craig remembers :-)
Techcrunch has most of the skinny on it.
The highlights are

Voicemail to text translation, pick up your voicemail right there on your pc. This is similar to Spinvox, user leaves you a voicemail, Google Voice translates it to text and emails it to you, great feature and FREE, similar services are 10-20c per message at present.

Text messaging, previously if you got a text message to your GrandCental number it went nowhere, now the guys have enabled number translation on this so they take it in and push it out to you. this is the most important feature in my opinion.

Calling facilities are also in place but I think the two above make it a killer application.
I am sure you will be hearing much more but this is seriously good news from the guys.

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6 comments...What do you think?

  1. Posted by Daniel Brusilovsky 12th March, 2009 at 6:30 am

    I can’t wait!

  2. Posted by Jackie Danicki 12th March, 2009 at 6:59 am

    What do you reckon this means for Spinvox? I know people who love it so much they say they’d pay double.

  3. Posted by Paul Sweeney 12th March, 2009 at 1:48 pm

    I think this will destroy SpinVox in the medium term, unless some kind telco needs a 2.0 play to compete with free (BT have ribbit). I think people will have to “take it for granted” that it is a very real possibility that communications will be managed via google. Enterprise players will be a little cautious to begin with that that will give other providers room to create and deploy new services.

    Caveat: its not a foregone conclusion. GTalk has not done THAT well. I love it, but as a % of overall IM?

  4. Posted by Evert Bopp 13th March, 2009 at 9:52 pm

    I only wish I could use it now….

  5. Posted by Craig Walker 18th March, 2009 at 4:55 am

    Pat! Glad to see we got off on the right foot for this launch! Keep up the great work. Exciting to see how well you are doing!

  6. Posted by Avazed 20th March, 2009 at 6:59 pm

    The main problem with this is how to get all your friends and business contacts to start using your google number instead of your normal one!

    I think Avakit can solve this though!! It helped me a lot when I changed jobs… otherwise it would have been a nightmare to sit and think of every person in the world who I need to send my new contacts to! Now I just need to add my google number. Highly recommend it

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