Google Voice

Google Hangouts Is Finally Ready to Die

As the time comes to put the old girl down, Google started messaging users about moving their organizations to Google Chat.

Google Wants to Help You Take the Perfect Selfie

The company introduced several new software tricks for the Pixel 7. But what about other Android phones?

Pixel’s Spam-Blocking Call Screen Feature Is Rolling Out More Widely

The global fight against robocalls continues with help from Google.

Google Will Shut Down the Google Shopping App for iOS and Android in a Few Weeks

If you liked shopping with the Google Shopping app on iOS or Android, you better switch over to the web version. Google is reportedly shutting down its Shopping app in a few weeks. Hints that the axe was coming were spotted by XDA Developers on Thursday via the code in the latest version of Google’s…

How to Make Phone Calls From Your Computer

If you don’t want to have your phone pressed to your ear all day, you can get those calls done on your laptop or desktop.

Five Years Later, Google Finally Remembers Google Voice Exists

Google Voice used to be one of Google’s best tools: The idea of having a single phone number for all of your devices was handy and uncomplicated in a time of extremely frequent communication. Unfortunately, over the years, Google let the nifty little voice service fall into relative disrepair—until today, that is. For the first…

Google Voice Gets Neural Network-Powered Transcription to Slash Errors

Google Voice has an incredibly useful function that provides you with a transcribed version of your voicemail—but if often gets things wrong. Now, Google is throwing neural networks at the problem to help improve its performance dramatically. The service now uses Google’s recurrent neural networks, similar to those used by Google’s voice search in Chrome…

Google Voice Is Dying and It’s Beautiful

I am a huge fan of what Google Voice can do. That’s why I’ve been calling for a mercy kill, so that its best features can thrive in something other than a limp husk of a service. And now that Google is finally beginning to merge Voice into Hangouts, the process has started in earnest.…

Google Voice Is One Step Closer To Dying and Becoming Hangouts

Google Voice is going to die and become a part of Hangouts. It’s going to be great. And it might actually be happening soon because you can now make Hangouts calls from the Google Voice homepage. http://www.engadget.com/2014/07/23/google-voice-offers-web-based-calls-through-hangouts-no-g-prof/ This (very minor) change brings Hangouts and Voice closer together than they’ve ever been and cuts Google+ out…

Google Might Finally Be Ready to Mercy Kill Google Voice

If there’s one thing Google can do to help make its messaging better than ever, it’s to kill the hulking zombie that is Google Voice and transplant its good parts into the still-living Google Hangouts. It hasn’t happened yet, but now there’s evidence in the Hangouts app that it might be coming soon. Deep in…

Hey Google, Here’s How You Win Messaging

This week I saw a demo of the best messaging system yet. One where SMS and non-SMS messages, all calls, come to all your devices automatically. It only had one major flaw. It’s trapped on an iPhone. The promised beauty of the new iMessage is that it manufactures the illusion that everyone you know is…

What’s Your Most Garbled Google Voice Transcript?

Google Voice transcriptions read like they came out of the ass-end of a hair dryer. They’re surprisingly terrible, especially since Google voice recognition is generally pretty reliable. Let’s all point at laugh at your worst examples of botched voicemails, Google-style. Might Google Voice’s transcribing robots office inside of a wind tunnel? That seems like the…

Why Google Killing Google Voice Would Be Fantastic

Brace yourself Google Voice fanboys, your treasured service is probably not long for this world. But don’t you worry; the sooner it’s dead the better we’ll all be. Reports are coming in from 9to5Google that everyone’s favorite search engine is about to bring the axe down on its long-neglected phone service. That should come as…

Google’s making Google Voice more secure by requiring you to call from a phone number registered to your account in order to check your voicemails by phone. But maybe more noteworthy is that Google is still making minor tweaks to Voice instead of killing it and focusing on Hangouts already. What’s up with that?

It’s Time To Kill Google Voice

Even if it’s not quite as amazing as it could be, Google Voice does some wonderful things. That’s what makes it hard to admit the truth: It’s time for Google Voice to die. A Problem Child When Google Voice launched in 2009, it was straight-up awesome. The concept of re-inventing the basic systems of telephonery…

What Happens When Siri and Google Voice Play Operator

Remember when you were in preschool, sitting around in a circle, whispering a message from person to person until it reached the last kid in the chain and was completely different? As part of his “Digital Humor Theory” thesis, Pratt Institute graduate student Michael J. Silber did just that with Siri’s text-to-voice and Google’s voicemail…

Twelephone Puts Video Calling Directly In Your Twitter Feed

As real-time communication is increasingly becoming the internet standard, Twelephone is stepping in taking voice and video calling straight to Twitter, no middleman required. https://gizmodo.com/living-on-a-stream-the-rise-of-real-time-video-5896674 Twelephone is essentially Google Voice nestled snugly within the confines of your browser. Through WebRTC, which uses JavaScript APIs too allow in-browser real-time communication, the new service captures the microphone…

Google Voice Finally Gets Updated for iOS 6

It’s been over two months since Apple released iOS 6 and the iPhone 5 and Google has just now updated Google Voice. I mean, finally. We’re on the second public build of iOS 6 with a third version having been released to devs earlier this month and pretty much halfway to June, which is, presumably…

Is Google Voice Sending Your Text Messages from Random Numbers?

Reports are coming in from the Google Voice help forums that SMS messages sent through Google Voice are being sent from random numbers. There are multiple complaints, including for voice SMS, claiming that the incorrect numbers are random, and different for each message. There’s an update coming to Google Voice prior to Android 4.2 being…

Google Voice Gets Circles Support

Google’s Circles feature is a great way to keep your various online social factions safely segregated. And, starting today, you can partition your Google Voice contact list the same way. Google announced today that Voice users will be able to sort and organize their callers using the Circles and Groups from their Google+ accounts. You…