After reading the headline, your first reaction may have been, “What, there is still Google Voice?” But yes, the tech giant may not have been paying much attention to the telephony service that lets you do voice and text messaging, as well as call forwarding and voicemail services. An unintentionally (or so they say) leaked banner on the website showed that they may be readying for a long, overdue update, the first time in what seems like forever.
People who still visited the site were surprised today when they opened it and saw a web banner saying, “The New Google Voice is Here). However, It didn’t lead to anywhere except the old version of the page and eventually, Google said that while they are indeed working on updates to the service, the banner was accidentally released but it wasn’t a very advanced April Fools’ Day prank. They did not give details as to what the updates will be, but given the fact that they already have a ready banner that was leaked, then this may be sooner rather than later.
Previously, the features of Google Voice and Hangouts tried to merge, but it didn’t really click. All of the Voice features are in Hangouts now, and so people continued to use the apps to make voice calls and all. But now that Hangouts is being transitioned to focus more on enterprise accounts (the Hangouts API is shutting down later this month), then there might be room for growth and improvements in the Voice service.
Allo and Duo have been released by Google recently, setting them up as the company’s default messaging and voice app, respectively. Now as to where Google Voice will fit in this digital ecosystem (at least in the US where Voice is avaialble) remains to be seen.
VIA: 9 to 5 Google
Love Voice. I use it every day. Hopefully the update only makes it better… and does not remove features.