The telephony service Google Voice provides call forwarding, voicemail, international call termination and voice and text messaging.
Launched in 2009 following the acquisition by Google of company GrandCentral, Google Voice allows users to choose a US telephone number free of charge. This number is then assigned to that user’s Gmail account, allowing them to send and receive calls directly from emails in their Gmail account or from a Google chat list.
Users in the US are able to place outbound calls to both domestic and international destinations.
What are the most recent updates?
The technology for Google Voice originally came from GrandCentral, which was founded in 2005 by Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet. After being acquired for $95 million in 2007, it was relaunched in 2009 with many similar features and some new ones.
New features included things like voicemail transcriptions and SMS managing.
The evolution of the product has seen it now become integrated into the Google Hangouts application since September 2014.
The most recent update to the service, in January 2017, Google overhauled the user interface with Material Design and made group and photo MMS natively supported in Voice.
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