On March 11, 2009 GrandCentral finally became Google Voice. I’ve used GrandCentral since November 2006 and found it to be a very useful and reliable service. David Poque does a great job of explaining GrandCentral’s original “one number for life” approach. In July 2007 GrandCentral was acquired by Google and for awhile people thought that Google killed this service. Here is a screen shot of the new home page:
So as a GrandCentral user I am one of the favored few to be able to use the new Google Voice service. Here are my initial thoughts:
- I prefer GrandCentral’s main page and preference settings. Google Voice uses Google’s bare bones, but familiar user interface. I’m sure I’ll get used to this over time.
- The transcribing feature is very cool and seems to work ok. I’ll have to try it with other languages like Afrikaans and/or Germany as well.
- The mobile interface works much better on my iPhone and I’m very impressed that you can playback voice messages using iPhone’s Quicktime player. I hope Google or somebody else will develop a native iPhone app for Google Voice. Here is the iPhone Mobile interface:
- One huge benefit for me is that I can now use OSX’s AddressBook with Google Contacts syncing functionality to keep my contacts updated in Google. GrandCentral didn’t provide an auto-sync facility and it wasn’t easy to keep contacts in GrandCentral in sync with my Mac’s AddressBook.
- International calling rates seem to be very competitive. I’ll blog about this in an upcoming post. Btw, you get $1 free to get you going. Thanks Google. For example I could speak for 17 minutes calling a land line in South Africa (8c a minute).
- With Google Voice you have an instant and FREE (for US users) conference call facility. Very cool. I’ve been using freeconferencecall.com.
- SMS is new and you can now save an SMS conversation. So far I’ve been able to send and receive SMS message to US numbers. I’ve had success in sending SMS messages to international numbers and only partial success in receiving from international numbers.
- Google doesn’t migrate your old voice messages, however you can still access them by going to the GrandCentral web page.
Here are some other useful postings regarding the new Google Voice service:
- Techcrunch believes it is very, very good.
- David Pogue believes that Google Voice is a little revolution for the rest of us.
- CNET – Google Voice: flawed but still awesome.
- @ Wired they speak of Google Voice World Domination.
- All Things Digital.
- Network World says that CrandCentral grows up as Google Voice!
- and finally Google Voice’s own blog.
I would like to know about your experience using Google Voice? Do you of any other similar service?
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