15 Facts About Google Voice

Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U S phone number to Google Account customers in the U S and Google Workspace customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Google Voice currently provides free PC-to-phone calling within the United States and Canada, and PC-to-PC voice and video calling worldwide between users of the Google+ Hangouts browser plugin .

Original voice of GrandCentral and Google Voice belonged to actress and voice-over artist, Laurie Burke, but has been replaced with recordings by Kiki Baessell, a Googler who had no experience in professional voice-overs, but was chosen because of her pleasant, familiar voice.

Google Voice hired a telecom design consultant, Peter Bouchard; he was brought on to make modifications and help relaunch the service.

Google transitioned former GrandCentral accounts to Google Voice and announced that the service would start accepting new members "within weeks" of the announcement.

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Google Voice was reported to be working on a desktop application, though rumors circulated that the project had been scrapped in favor of a browser-based solution.

In September 2014, certain Google Voice features were integrated into the Google Hangouts application, an instant messaging client, which is a replacement for Google Talk.

Currently Google Voice PC-to-phone calling works only for calls into the United States and Canada or for domestic or international calls from the United States and Canada; Google plans to implement this for other countries, but a time frame has not been released.

When Google Voice was offered during beta testing, Gmail Labs offered an add-on so users could listen to voicemail messages in their Gmail inbox.

Google Voice supports sending text messages to phone numbers in the U S and Canada, but users can receive text messages from anywhere in the world.

Google Voice terminated support for some XMPP services in May 2014, disrupting service for 3rd party apps.

Users who want calls to be picked up by their home, work, or mobile phone voicemail systems or answering machines must turn off call screening in Google Voice and make sure that their phone's voicemail systems or answering machines pick up within 25 seconds.

Google Voice responded that it is not obligated to allow these calls.

Google Voice requires an existing "real" [non-VOIP] phone number and a generated PIN to register.

Scammers wanting multiple anonymous unauthorized Google Voice numbers have tricked strangers into registering Google Voice numbers to their personal phone numbers.