Happy First Birthday Google Voice; It’s Been a Long Year [Criticism]

The Google Voice team is cheerfully celebrating the 1st birthday of Google Voice, Google’s voice transmission service. Google Voice, which is still by invitation only, offers users a free telephone number in any U.S. area code, the ability to ring multiple phones, visual voicemail with transcription, free SMS, free long distance calling within the U.S. and Canada and significantly discounted rates to other countries.

I’d like to remind those with short memories that this really isn’t the 1st birthday. GrandCentral launched the service in 2005 and Google acquired it in July 2007 (see here). It should be celebrating a 5th birthday. Apparently, the Google Voice team feels that it is the 1 year anniversary of the “launch” of the service. Other chest-beating about Google Voice advancements in the past year also disappoints. Consider:

• Mobile Apps. Yes, decent mobile apps for Blackberry and Android. Wasted time on an iPhone app that was never approved by Apple.
• SMS-to-Email. Yes, you can receive SMS in email now. So what?
• Chrome extension. Yes, it’s actually quite nice. Score one for the team.
• Voicemail in Gmail. Not essential but, yes, an improvement.
• Google Voice with Existing Number. This is complete nonsense. It existed before Google acquired GrandCentral and it’s not a feature at all. It’s a way to use Google Voice for voicemail only. It’s a feature offered by your cell provider to forward unanswered calls to your Google Voice number. You have to forfeit simultaneous ring and other bells and whistles to use it. I addressed this back in November 2009.

These are some features that users have been requesting for many years (note again: plural) that have yet to be implemented:

• Number porting. Users want to keep their phone numbers but use all of the Google Voice services. This could be accomplished with number porting. Since the early GrandCentral days, this feature has been requested. Is it in the works? To add insult to the intelligence and taste of Google Voice users, we were offered colorful business cards to show off our unwanted Google Voice phone numbers.
• Voice response to caller presentation. Caller presentation allows Google Voice users to screen calls or listen in as voicemails are being recorded. Unfortunately, it only responds to touchtones. Accordingly, I turned it off entirely, as I suspect many others have done.
• VOIP integration. It would be helpful if we could place calls from a computer by VOIP transmission, instead of exclusively by telephone. This is probably in the works because Google acquired Gizmo5 back in early November 2009 for $30m in cash and has nothing to show for it yet. (Query: when will Gizmo5 similarly celebrate a 1st birthday? It dates back at least as far as 2005.)
• For a complete list of missing features, look here. It’s basically the Google Voice team’s official to-do list.

So, why all this whining? Well, GrandCentral (pre-acquisition) was rolling out features much faster than the Google Voice team. Some protest that we should all be thankful because this is a free service. I contend that it certainly isn’t. For starters, low cost international calling has the potential to generate significant revenue. There are fees for various items like changing your phone number. And, perhaps most importantly, we are donating our voices to improve the quality of Google’s speech-to-text, a precursor to Google voice translation. Arguably, we’re all paying for the service.

As many of you know, I’m a Google supporter but the Google Voice project has been nothing but a disappointment vis-a-vis where this project would be had it stayed with the GrandCentral team. I still use Google Voice and I like it but this may be another case of a large company acquiring a small company to the detriment of the services offered.

Happy stinkin’ 5th birthday, Google Voice.

[via Official Google Voice Blog]

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