Will Google Hang Up on Voice?
wired.com
wired.com
Why Wired would publish an article with this title is pretty obvious, but for those of you who don't read through, there's absolutely nothing to see here. Resources continue to be invested in the project.
Everything Google has said on the matter indicates that they know that they would piss off too many people if the functionality was reduced or went away - and that the grievance would be real, from their perspective. It's far more likely at this point, based on everything we've seen (and that this article links to) that it will be integrated more heavily with + and hangouts and talk. Your phone number isn't going away.
It would be a real bummer to see the phone number I'm now putting on business cards disappear...And I'd like Google Voice to let me place calls from my phone, too (when not in the US, you can only call from the computer). And transfer any call to Google Voice directly to my cellphone..I don't want new features, I want better quality and the same features than US users.
https://support.google.com/glass/answer/3086044?hl=en
If you're using Google Voice, the SMS will be sent from your Google Voice number. Otherwise, outbound SMS messages will be sent from the native SMS app on your phone.
I was with sipphone client before it turned into gizmo5 and was swallowed. I remember the pains of reconfiguration (hardware ata + sip enabled dect phone + handheld + desktop + laptop ...), and pushing the new phone number to contacts, including the fact that to this day my sip-enabled dect phone at home still can't make outgoing call using GV.
I don't want the same scenario to repeat itself - I'll pay for the privilege of not having to wonder whether the service might close or not.
All three are well-established companies, though Callcentric is probably the best. I've personally ported a GV number to them. The service isn't free and you don't get voicemail transcription or a fancy web interface, but it's reliable and very good at making/receiving phone calls.
SendHub (https://sendhub.com) will give you a virtual business line (SMS+Voice) for free that you can access from the web or from your iPhone/iPad/Android device.
I know we support 1-800 numbers on paid plans, just hop on support chat and they will take care of you.
Google Voice is a paid service (additional numbers, porting numbers, etc). They won't shut it down. They might deprecate the free-to-use features and make it paid only, perhaps. But it will not go away.
Edit: I should rephrase: they did not "shut down" my account. They just informed me I would no longer be eligible to renew my account when my subscription expired.
http://googleaffiliatenetwork-blog.blogspot.com/2013/04/an-u...
“we’ve made the difficult decision to retire Google Affiliate Network and focus on other products that are driving great results for clients.”
I got a long text a few days ago from someone that had to be split into three. The first and third part was attached to the previous conversation, and the second part started a new one. No idea why it does this, but the fact that I've been searching online for an answer since 2010 and still don't have one is worrisome.
Yet that is the world we live in. Phones are expected to have all these features and phone numbers are expected to be able to accept text messages.
Just two weeks ago I wasted an hour waiting for my friends because GV silently dropped MMS multi-person chat messages sent to me. Not ok.
Voice is world class and there are no competitors that come close for less than $10 per month.
(please don't tell Google this.)
No new features in the latest update but the .apk teardown suggests future functionality: http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/04/15/apk-teardown-google-...