According to this story at Tech Crunch Google is relaunching their GrandCentral voice/phone service as Google Voice tomorrow. If you head on over to voice.google.com you can see the new logo and it will even prompt you to login with your Google account. As of this moment though (About 10pm PST, Wednesday night) it’s giving me an “Invalid request” error. Looks like it’s a new toy I can look forward to playing with tomorrow.
I was among those lucky enough to have an account with GrandCentral before their acquisition by Google in 2007. Actually, I have a couple, but have mostly used one as my primary business number for the past two years. As a web developer, being able to check my voicemail and manage my calls just a click away from my inbox has done wonders for my productivity. It also makes screening the numerous daily calls I get about outsourcing my projects much easier to deal with 
But what’s more fun than a new(ish) Google product? Complaining about all the features it doesn’t have!
Some of the purported features being added already address these:
- New Interface. Check out the TechCrunch story for the screenshots, but it looks like they’ve Googlified the interface (Read: minimalist, Arial, light blue tabs) which is probably a significant improvement over the current GrandCentral interface that suffers from random Flash integration (A personal pet-peeve) and strange design choices like putting the location of the drop-down list for applying actions to selected messages at the bottom of the page.
- Text Messages. I was pleased when Google unveiled SMS messaging within GChat not too long ago. I tried desperately to figure out a way to use the number my Gmail account was sending text messages from as a personal text-message only number but could never figure out a solution. With my own number, that shouldn’t be a problem now.
Clamoring for new features on a product that doesn’t even exist yet is pretty silly, but I can tell already that the one I’m going to want and will probably have to wait for is an API. A few months ago I started twiddling around with Twilio – a telephony service with a dead-simple API for people who don’t have the time or means to setup a PBX solution like Asterisk – and it was a lot of fun. I immediately wanted to construct a custom phone tree setup for my business, but didn’t want to deal with the hassle of switching numbers. If Google opens up an API for Google Voice, I might not have to.
When the service actually rolls out I’ll try to write up a proper review.
Update: I haven’t scanned it closely yet, but you can search the Google Support pages about Google Voice
Another Update: And here’s the official Google blog post about it. Hopefully I’ll get my invite soon so I can review.
{ 4 comments }
Hey George, just saw your post and wanted to drop you a line to let you know that we are able to port existing U.S. phone numbers to Twilio, so you don’t have to switch numbers to take advantage of the Twilio API.
If you want to get this process started for your phone tree project just drop us a line at help@twilio.com and we can get things rolling right away!
Cheers,
Danielle Morrill
Twilio Community Manager
Your link at “Google blog post about it” is formatted incorrectly.
Oops! Thanks Maxo. The link should be fixed now.
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 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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