Google: Your New Phone Company (Part III)

Looking for a competitive telecom choice? Soon, you may have to look no further than the biggest Kahuna on the Internet, Google Inc., which has rolled out a veritable cornucopia of telephony applications, collected under the title of Google Voice.

As the name suggests, the apps make no bones about their intentions: to give the voice world a run for its money. Or rather, for no money, because Google Voice is free.

The search behemoth unveiled the suite in its official blog on Thursday. It’s actually an overhaul for GrandCentral, a single-number find-me-follow-me service it acquired in 2007 for $50 million. Now, Google Voice gives you a number that all other lines can point to, but also adds in free domestic calling and cheap international telephony, a centralized SMS repository that can act as a searchable archive, a voicemail-to-text transcription service a la SpinVox, plus call management. Users can screen calls, make use of customizable call handling, greetings, and availability options.

Google Voice appears to be taking on or deflating a variety of voice business models, the most obvious being bring-your-own-access VoIP. Google’s free or cheap Internet calling appears to be on par with other offerings in the market, albeit with lower international rates than VoIP darling Skype. It also has a gigantic embedded base of users and a variety of Web applications to integrate the voice calling with to boost usage. And did we mention it’s free for domestic calling? One possible downside: for now, Google Voice is a U.S.-only offering, unlike Skype, which can be used anywhere in the world.

Then there’s the voicemail-text capability. It allows a user to search, sort, save, forward, copy and paste voicemail messages as text that can show up as SMS or e-mail—for free. Paid services like SpinVox and CallWave that do the same thing might have to scramble to clarify their value propositions, though integration with carrier networks should stand them in good stead. Google Voice, after all, is an over-the-top proposition.

The service is limited to GrandCentral users for now as a closed beta test, but will be made public in the coming weeks. No word on whether Google will add calling habits to the list of behaviors it plans to follow in order to better target ads.

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