Google Voice wants to manage your calls

Google unveiled a service called Google Voice on Thursday that indicates Google wants to do with your telephone communications what companies such as Yahoo! have done with email.

Google Voice - the new version of the GrandCentral technology Google acquired in July 2007 - has the potential to make the search giant a middleman in people's telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual phones a person uses and handle voicemail.

The old version could let people centralise telephone services, screen their calls, and listen to voicemail over the web. But the new version offers several significant new feature. Google now uses its speech-to-text technology to transcribe voicemail, making it possible to search for particular words. Contacts in Gmail is now used to instruct Google Voice how to treat various callers. And Google Voice now can send and receive SMS text messages and set up conference calls.

Existing GrandCentral users could upgrade as of Thursday, and Google plans to offer it to the public after "a number of weeks", said Craig Walker, product manager of real-time communications and head of Google Voice.

Google plans to offer the service for free, despite Google being in the midst of a profitability push, trying to wring more money from existing sites, adding advertisements to properties such as Google Maps, Finance and News that previously lacked them, and cancelling projects such as Google Lively that didn't pass financial muster.

With Google Voice, though, the company is showing more of its earlier, more patient approach.

"Our goal is to be able to offer it to people for free," Walker said in an interview. Asked what the revenue model is for Google Voice, he said: "Let's get a bunch of happy users engaged in Google properties and getting their voicemail through this. Google gets value out of having happy Google users."

The company does charge for international calls however, and said it wouldn't rule out advertising in the future.

GrandCentral has appeared largely dormant from the outside since the Google acquisition but Walker said there was plenty of work going on behind the scenes.

"In addition to innovation, there's been a process of getting migrated and integrating with the Google infrastructure," he said.

Original article: Google Voice: A push to rewire your phone service from CNET News.com