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Google Voice for everyone
June 22, 2010
(Cross-posted from the
Google Voice Blog
)
A little over a year ago, we released an
early preview
of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S. and Canada, low-priced international calls and more—the only catch was you had to request and receive an invite to try it out. Today, after lots of testing and tweaking, we’re excited to open up Google Voice to the public, no invitation required.
Over the past year, we’ve introduced a
mobile web app
, an
integrated voicemail player in Gmail
, the ability to use
Google Voice with your existing number
and
more
. Over a million of you are now actively using Google Voice, and many of the features released over the past year (like
SMS to email
and our
Chrome extension
) came as a result of your suggestions, so thanks!
If you haven’t yet tried Google Voice, we can’t wait for you to try it out and
let us know what you think
. Check out our revamped
features page
to learn about everything Google Voice can do, and if you haven’t seen it yet, this video provides a good overview in less than two minutes:
We’re proud of the progress we’ve made with Google Voice over the last few years, and we’re still just scratching the surface of what’s possible when you combine your regular phone service with the latest web technology. It’s even more amazing to think about how far communication has come over the last couple hundred years. To put things in context, we created this infographic to visualize some recent history of human communication and how Google Voice uses the web to help people communicate in more ways than ever before (click the image for a larger version):
Update
10:53AM
: Just to clarify, though we've opened up sign-ups, Google Voice is still limited to everyone in the U.S. for now.
Posted by Craig Walker & Vincent Paquet, Google Voice Product Managers
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