googlevoice fluid app icon (Photo credit: benlundquist)
When one thinks about GoogleVoice one has to wonder if the team at Google has given up on it.
Let's face the facts, not much is really new with it, and what has been new has been more iterative post GrandCentral (my agency was one of two agencies that helped make it what it was and I was a founding option-holder.)
While there are now apps to do things with GoogleVoice on smartphones and tablets, no real easy to implement smarts have found their way into the service that millions of people love to use. For example, we're still stuck with manually setting up do not disturb, even if it can be a timed DND. But while calls get blocked, SMS notifications of calls still come through. Transcription is still very mechanical, and often error prone, while tighter integration with GoogleApps and Gmail seems to be missing. Sure you can send your messages to your GMAIL, but texting with threading isn't there, you have to go to the GoogleVoice web page to see that, or be using a mobile app on your smartphone. There's also been no enterprise oriented efforts to beef up the service to do more between groups of users within the same company nor has any conferencing or group messaging been added to the mix. Even something as obvious as a GoogleVoice integration with Hangouts is lacking, where an SMS could go from a Hangout organizer or scheduled Hangout from the Google Calendar using GoogleVoice is absent. About the only integration we've seen is either with contacts, or with Sprint as a GoogleVoice customer's mobile operator, with number porting. Nice, but that's more than a year old news.
The bottom line is most of what we have today with GoogleVoice we had when GrandCentral was its name. As a loyal GoogleVoice user I look forward to the day when there's more to it than we have now, but sadly, I won't be holding my breath.
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