At the same time, though, adopting Google Voice as your communications commander introduces some potential negatives, ranging from privacy-related concerns to questions about reliability. Here’s a breakdown of five pros and five cons to help you determine whether the service is right for you. Read more at www.computerworld.com |
Elgan: Why Google Voice is free |
Of all the free services Google Voice provides, it’s likely that transcription of voicemails is the most expensive for Google. Users tell me that transcription is very accurate, which probably means humans are doing it. My guess is that short, easy messages are machine-transcribed, but that longer messages are off-shored to human transcribers. |
Gmail’s invasion of your personal messages is just the beginning. In the future, I believe the company intends to combine what it knows about you — friends, family, purchases, location, schedule, blog posts and especially what you talk about in e-mail, text messages, chat and telephone calls — into knowledge about what you want to buy. It will then show you ads based on that knowledge. |
If all this sounds sinister, it isn’t. This is simply where advertising is going. Most people have demonstrated willingness to give up privacy for free stuff. And in fact, contextual advertising itself is desirable. It’s better to be pitched products you’re likely to want rather than products you don’t want. |
Hands on with Google Voice |
PC World -
Chances are you’ve heard or read about Google’s phone management system Google Voice, but you’re not really sure what it does. There’s a good reason for this aura of mystery. Google Voice got its start as a phone service called GrandCentral, which the search giant bought in 2007. It’s been in beta ever since-but unlike other Google betas that are open to the general public, this one was limited to former GrandCentral users and a select group of industry elite. |
| But now Google is opening up the service to a limited number of new users, many of whom I’m sure will be as impressed as I am with Google Voice’s power and elegance. |
More details about Google Voice and its unique features Google grabs a million phone numbers for Google Voice
Single number will forward calls to all phones.
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“I’ve only been using Google Voice for a few months, but it’s completely changed the way I use voicemail and communicate, just in general,” said Kevin Dando, director of digital and education communications for PBS. “When it goes public, I think the rush to grab Google Voice numbers is going to be stunning. I know some of my friends check the Google Voice page almost every day to see when they can grab a number and get started using it.” |
| Google Voice has a number of unique features including call transfer between a user’s devices, multi-party conferencing, conversion of voice calls to text messages, cut-rate international calling, and call transcription. |
But the gem is the fact that a user can have one phone number people can dial to reach them regardless of where they are located, either home or mobile. Google Voice uses VoIP to link collections of phone numbers. Read more at computerworld.co.nz |
Google gets it, its all just electronic "ones and zeroes". With voice recognition and auto transcription, voice messages will be another set of data to be indexed and searched. | Google Voice’s Secret Weapon: Number Portability |
Today you are issued a new phone number when you sign up for Google Voice. But we’ve confirmed that a very small number of people have ported their existing numbers to Google (Google uses Level3 to handle phone numbers). In the U.S. it’s possible to port any phone number to another service provider - even a mobile number to a voip provider like Level3. |
That means you can switch your mobile number to Google and then just use whatever device you happen to have in your hand to receive calls. That’s an extremely powerful feature for Google Voice. Read more at www.techcrunch.com |
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Google Voice: 5 reasons to use it, 5 reasons to think twice
