Google Voice has been a very loved product among the invite-only American users that it currently serves. By giving an opportunity to replace all your different call numbers with one number from Google Voice, users have finally been able to consolidate their communications at one place. Also, with features like threaded SMS, voicemail transcriptions and conference calling, the potential of this service started to show.
However, Google wants more out of this. Last month, the company acquired VoIP based startup, Gizmo5 who joined the talented workforce at Voice. So what is the company now looking at? In a recent interview with E-Week, Google Vice President of Product Management, Bradley Horowitz opined that all the features currently available are merely “scratching the surface”. Horowitz insisted that his team was working on a much improved product come 2010. Horowitz says
We want to make sure you’re communication is available to you irrespective of where you are at, what device you have in your pocket, etc.
Rumors are that Google has been working to move Voice completely into a VoIP service, effectively competing with Skype. This way, the company would be expanding outside US and could be launching a worldwide service. Also, with current capabilities with features like threaded SMSes, the service prove to be pretty effective. Also, with call forwarding features, American users who use Google Voice to consolidate their calling numbers can continue to make use of this functionality.
As always, Google has not explicitly let their intentions known. But that is a pretty likely possibility. What do you think of this move?
[via eWeek]