Google to reportedly kill Voice, integrate it into Hangouts | Hacker News Reader

Google to reportedly kill Voice, integrate it into Hangouts

pcworld.com

73 pointszosegal85 comments

Why is google willfully sabotaging every great product they have all in the name of one terrible one that nobody wants?

Up until about 2010 or so, they were absolutely legendary for their skillful execution of ideas - just the right interface, feature-set, and balance. Time and time again, everything they did they knocked out of the park.

And then, something changed.

Now they are changing what they did right by taking the dumbest moves over and over again - the ones that completely destroys their credibility and alienates their userbase.

Is there a single user anywhere who wants this? I really don't get it.

If google did a survey:

"Are you happy with google voice or would you rather have it in our wacky skype knockoff that you use with our goofy facebook clone?"

I'm trying to think of what it would look like if other companies decided to do a similar thing. It would be like if say, General Mills came out with a terrible wretched artificial sweetener and then decide to put it in every product they sell because well, it's their sweetener - of course they should completely dismantle all of their successful lines in the name of their incredibly unsuccessful one. Duh!

I really hope that they find the John-Scully's who are internally making all these retarded decisions and stop doing what they say - or else they're well on their way to being a has-been. Yet another great company that somehow put a bunch of ivy-league fortune-500 trainwreck-types in charge and then trusted them until it was too late.

In 1999 my friend called Google The next altavista. At this rate, he may be right.

I like it, but then i generally like the products as a whole.

- I've been using Voice for ages, with little to no improvement. This will bring lots of improvement, instead of me worrying about Voice like it's the next Reader. - I've also been using Plus for ages, so i don't have a fear it either.

I understand this Plus requirement is annoying to some, but i honestly don't get the resentment.

To me, Plus is google doing what they should have done with Wave. Made a product, and invested in it. As a company, integrating your products is not a bad thing, it's a good thing, imo. I'm sure many will scream "But not when your users hate your other product!" and.. well.. tough shit heh.

If it ends up being a terrible move then they'll pay for it and die out. But i don't think it's a wrong move for them to try.

As it is, Voice is a wasteland, and it actually getting some love and attention will be awesome. I'm looking forward to it.

Well, this kind of sucks.

I use a Google Voice number that is associated with a Gmail account that I do not use for any other purpose (Hangouts/Talk or otherwise). It doesn't even have a Google+ account associated with it.

It's nice to have single number that can ring all my lines.

If/when this is killed, what's the alternative?

(Article appears to be down/inaccessible for me).

Read the article. They are not killing Google Voice. They are rolling it into Hangouts.

... which will then require you to log in with a Google Plus-upgraded account. I have two Gmail accounts, and can't use the hangouts feature on one of them (in the browser or through their client) without enabling Plus.

Fair enough. But the GP seemed to be worried about inbound call forwarding through Google Voice numbers, which I imagine will continue to work even without using the Hangouts client, which would mean you don't have to use G+.

Google's login system is horribly broken. They seem to have to reinvent a method for handling the multi account scenario in every product.

The resistance to adding G+ to accounts seems Sisphyean. Larry Page clearly envisions a common integrate identity systems across the product tree and I don't think anyone is going to stop him.

A common identity system across the product tree is not a bad thing actually. If it were there from the beginning nobody would complain about this whole thing now.

The problem is that they wanted to brand this move as "hey g+ify your account".

It probably has something to do with the change in terms and conditions. I guess they could have forced everybody to this new terms and conditions (or leave) but instead they let people choose to use google products with the old terms and conditions by letting users to actively opt in to g+ (ehm, some might say "tricked", but that's another story).

What I wanted to say is that usually people look at this whole thing as an evil move, but hey all the companies around amend their terms and conditions and usually don't let you a choice about whether you want to be part of a new incarnation of the service, or not yet.

Note: I'm not talking in favour or against the actual terms and conditions (e.g. the real name policy), this is an orthogonal issue. I have the feeling that in the end it all boils down to this.

Anyway, this is so confusing. The fact that we are still talking about all this crap means that the was a failure in communication.

I wish there was a way to switch to this new identity system, and then disable G+ for your account. This would make so many people happy and probably it won't reduce the number of new G+ users by much.

I find Voice to be incredibly useful when wanting to conduct business with someone once and then have no connection to them again. Such as Craigslist. Every time I list, it is a disposable number.

http://burnerapp.com/

It is a paid service, vs Voice which is free, but you may prefer the paid service depending on how badly the Hangouts integration goes.

Thanks, I will have to look into that if it comes down to Voice becoming unattractive.

I have Google Voice. I don't use it for outbound calls, just inbound. I'm porting it out to Twilio. $1/month for keeping the number plus $0.01/minute to receive calls (http://www.twilio.com/voice/pricing).

It'll be more complicated, but I'm not terribly shocked I have to replace yet another Google service with an outside solution.

Hurry up Mailpile.is! Before I have to move out of Gmail!

Twilio is sure complicated. It's not at all for the end users who are just looking for a ready to use service or app. It's a lot costlier.

True, but this is Hacker News. We're not the typical audience.

With regards to costlier, yes, pennies per minute are more than free Google Voice. But if Google Voice is going away in the traditional sense, having another option is worthwhile even if you must pay for it.

Calling Vault is an alternative - https://callingvault.com

SendHub is a Google Voice alternative for business: http://www.sendhub.com

I'm finding voip.ms to be pretty good, no major issues in over a year of using them. It's a power user tool, so it's not quite as slick as Voice was.

I ported my old Voice number to voip.ms too.

I've used Voip.ms as my primary phone service for years and it's been very reliable. Voip.ms is one of only two VoIP services that has a Gold Award at DSLReports:

http://www.dslreports.com/gbu

I also have a Google Voice account, but the service is less reliable than Voip.ms, and I only use it to call a couple of family members who use Google Voice as their primary phone service.

Just integrate with Google+ and then don't use Google+? I don't use Google+, but at some point I integrated with it. It doesn't affect me at all.

You can't brag about it on HN.

For people like me who follow this space closely, this is not news. And to be fair, the article doesn't really claim it as news.

The Google Voice team was rolled into the Hangouts team long ago. The only thing they haven't done is roll the Google Voice app's functionality into the Hangouts app.

I don't understand why you'd roll all of your products into something that has a terrible user experience. I'm a long-time Google/Android user, and its just painful using Hangouts. I disabled it and switched to Telegram.

Google Voice has never received a lot of attention or polish. (Disappointing to me, as a user since it was still named GrandCentral.) I hope it is integrated into Hangouts, because presumably it would see more improvement as part of such an important product than it sees now.

It is sad. I like Google Voice a lot. When it came out it was ahead of its time. When my phone is down I can use Voice to make calls for free (I am US based). I don't think Voice is available to international users yet? Have it?

The ability to call people using Google is already available on Hangout. If you upgrade your Gmail to use Hangout (I still have accounts that are not using Hangout) you will make calls via Hangout interface.

I agree with you, which is why I started Bolt (shameless plug: https://bolt.co). We are just getting started on our messaging app, which will be separate from our voice app due to the completely different use-cases.

The monolithic Hangouts app suffers from a bit of a Jack-of-all-trades problem. It's pretty good at four things, but not great at any single one.

Thanks for the plug, headed over to try your app now!

Thanks! Send me an email at andrew@bolt.co and I'll give you my phone number if you want to try a test call.

A number of security professionals have expressed serious concern about Telegram, including Moxie Marlinspike [0] [1] and Geoffroy Couprie [2].

It's really painful to see Telegram gaining popularity, when it has such glaring errors.

You should instead use OTR on Jabber (ChatSecure [3]), or TextSecure [4] (which now has an Internet delivery mechanism).

[0]: http://thoughtcrime.org/blog/telegram-crypto-challenge/

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6936539

[2]: http://unhandledexpression.com/2013/12/17/telegram-stand-bac...

[3]: https://chatsecure.org/

[4]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.thoughtcri...

Those criticisms aren't about Telegram's UI as compared to Hangouts, though. At a minimum, your communication through Telegram is as secure as your communication through a google property.

The most useful feature of Google Voice to me is the voicemail transcription. It's not perfect, but it's good enough it saves me from having to listen to the voicemail about 90% of the time.

There are plenty of other voip/call forwarding services, but are there any that duplicate that functionality?

Sendhub.

It's not what you're looking for necessarily, but I'm a Grasshopper user, and am quite impressed with their voice mail transcription as well.

I’ve used VoiceCloud (http://www.voicecloud.com/) for the last 5+ years. Would not go back to regular must-listen-to-your-3-minutes-of-rambling voicemail for a second!!

This is all that I use Google Voice for. I love having a transcribed voicemail emailed to me, for free. Are there any other options out there? I've noticed lately that the Google Voice app sucks - the UI is unintuitive and is painfully slow to refresh my messages. I'd be happy to switch if there is an alternative.

I assume existing Voice numbers will at least continue working/forwarding? That's my main concern. I have a few different Google Voice numbers I use for different purposes, and my wife actually uses one as her primary number (against my recommendation). I've kind of expected something "bad" to happen to Voice for a while, but as long as the forwarding continues to work this isn't the end of the world for me.

For some reason the site isn't loading for me. If they want to integrate the features of Voice into Hangouts then that's great. The Voice app has been utterly neglected for years.

If they want to kill all the Voice features, then I'll be very disappointed.

Do you have HTTPS Everywhere installed? I had to disabled it for pcworld.com before the article would load.

this move would be a prelude to the cancellation of voice (after it flounders in its new forced home):

http://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns

(note google voice is the highest cancellation risk predicted)

Voice isn't being "cancelled," its features are just being integrated into the service it should have been in to start with.

I must be missing something. Google voice isn't on the top 10 list, and it's third in the 5-year survival chart. Where is it highest?

Ugh, I hate that SMS is conflated with Hangouts as it is. It causes notifications for work-related chat to get mixed in with notifications for personal text messages on my phone. Can anyone suggest alternative SMS clients for Android?

I used to use ChompSMS and liked it.

I'm quite a fan of Hello, but you need to explicitly turn off a "feature" that tells people you message you send it with Hello. I have no idea why they don't just charge a dollar for it.

Pinger offers free texts, but it won't work with your Google Voice number: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pinger.tex...

IIRC Google Voice is due to remove API access for third-party apps.

My favorite is Textra. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.textra

TextSecure is a fantastic, free replacement for the built-in SMS app on Android, even if you don't use any of its encryption features.

Agreed! I'm recommending it to anyone uncomfortable with the SMS/Hangouts merge.

TextSecure! Nobody I know uses it, so the encryption/privacy features are basically useless, but it's a fast, well-designed, pretty app regardless. It also has a feature I love: persistent notifications for unread texts.

Seconding this, switched to TextSecure when they combined SMS and Hangouts. It is an excellent SMS app replacement. The crypto doesn't get in your way, even when almost none of your contacts also use it.

I love Handset SMS! I never use anything else once I found it! You can customize the alerts you get, icon/vibrate pattern/sound and other features as well.

I like the standard AOSP Messaging app, which someone has bundled up here for people whose Android doesn't come with it installed.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=fr.slvn.mms

I've been using "Hello" and it's quite nice as a basic / super-simple SMS app. Very minimalist, though.

While all of this consolidation of their myriad overlapping services and products into a small suite of core services that offer strong featuresets makes sense, I'm constantly astonished how bad they've done at it. Bombarding users with annoying questions about Plus (and the questions are annoying regardless of your opinions on Plus - they never should've even tried to make Plus optional, just enable it but keep it out of the freaking way) and screwing up these transitions... does anybody like any of these new Google apps? And these new apps are increasingly awful or nonexistent outside of Android/Chrome. Can you even send a message through hangouts without installing the browser plug-in? Do they even have a browser-version of Currents?

The issues for a LONG TIME Voice user:

1) Voice Mailbox - What Now?

2) My mobile phone number IS my Google Voice Number (Sprint)

3) Ring at multiple locations (Isn't valuable to me anymore)

4) The google.com/voice web page is a lifesaver for searching through my text, and voice mail. (Most Needed Function)

I am also a long-time Google Voice user. It's been my primary number for about 5 years now.
The issues you raise are all irrelevant, except for #4. They are not killing off Google Voice phone numbers or functionality. They are just rolling it into Hangouts.
I don't know what they are planning to do with their google.com/voice web property though.

Also MMS support. I know this works for certain carriers through some sorcery but for regular GV users we're stuck with hacky solutions.

They also removed the last bit of Jabber interoperability in the new Google Mail chat/hangouts frontend.
I used to be able to talk to my Jabber frieds on both Android and Gmail/Web. They dropped federation on Android with the move to Hangouts, and -- unsurprisingly -- they're now doing the same for Gmail/Web as it's moving to Hangouts.
I'm eyeing TextSecure as a replacement IM tool. Sort of hoping the TextSecure desktop app comes around before the Gmail Hangout integration becomes mandatory; but as cool as TextSecure may be from a security perspective, they haven't exactly blown me away with the timeliness of their releases. ;)

Aaand no federation with TextSecure either.. :/

No? I think it's something they want to do, there's a reference to it in the recent blog post[0]: "The new TextSecure push transport is a federated protocol, and inter-operates transparently with the CyanogenMod deployment of the TextSecure protocol to their 10MM+ users a few months ago."
I gotta say, while I can't really fault them for not releasing the software as quickly as I'd wish they did, I do think their communication could be a bit better. I still have no idea how, for instance, the CM integration works on either the user interface or the technical level. The inter-operability may be transparent; it certainly is oblique. ;)
Don't get me wrong, though, I like what they're doing and I'm looking forward to seeing more.
[0] https://whispersystems.org/blog/the-new-textsecure/

Yes, but in related threads my hope was crushed: It seems that 'federated' means: "We have a list of servers that we trust". CM is one of those.
You and I won't be able to host a TextSecure server for our friends and family and still be connected to the general public.

The federation challenge for TextSecure comes up a lot and IIRC it has to do with the fact that it's a SMS replacement so accounts are phone number and phone numbers aren't routable to the user's domain. If I understand correctly it would be like trying to deliver messages after truncating the "@blah.tld" part from a jabber/email address--lots of opportunity for shenanigans.

> they're now doing the same for Gmail/Web as it's moving to Hangouts.
Moving? Hasn't this been the case for the last two years?

I'm referring to this: http://gmailblog.blogspot.de/2013/05/try-out-new-hangouts-ex...
It's still opt-in, at least for me.

Huh. Yeah, it just showed up for me one day and I continued ignoring it.

As more and more of these get GPlused, the more repuslive they are become. Among all the IM apps out there, I think hangouts sucks the most. More than the fb messenger. 2-3 years back, a lot of people I knew were using gtalk. Infact that was the default IM. We use watsapp now, or fb in case we don't have a number, but not hangouts. This massive transition clearly happened during the gtalk to hangouts change and I don't think I will go back unless the experience becomes better.

gtalk is still the default IM in pretty much everyone I know from different social circles. Even fb messenger during work hours I tend to see pretty much everyone in gtalk while fb is very sparse. And don't get me started on whatsapp, I don't know a single person who uses that, and nobody seems to even be aware what it is when I ask around. I guess they all have different use cases. I for one have been and will stay with gtalk.

Hey Google I don't want everything in Google+

Your comment reminds me of recent article on HN, which I can't find at the moment. The jest of the entry was that G+ isn't for the customer, it's for google to organize its data on you. Here is another article by The Guardian that touches on a similar sentiment. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2013/jun/04/googl...

Hey All, definitely check out SendHub as a Business Replacement for google voice. It has all of the same features (and plenty GV doesn't). In my opinion SendHub also has better apps and a way better web interface.
Also, I'm a Co-Founder here at SendHub. So if you have any questions on getting this to work please drop us a line. (ryan@sendhub.com)

Any update on when MMS is coming? I'll pay for it for personal use when that gets implemented.

How do minutes and texts work when all of it redirecting to another number? In other words, I already pay for unlimited text and several hundred minutes as part of my mobile phone plan. The vast majority of my communications are forwarded to that phone. Would I have to pay SendHub again for those minutes and messages if they were routed through SendHub?

I saw this coming once Hangouts gained SMS compatibility. The nice thing is, I won't have 2 separate apps to view all my messages. I'll be able to make calls and text via Voice(within hangouts) for work, receive normal texts and calls in hangouts, and still be able to chat up with my circles!

This isn't necessarily new news (they spoke of it last year, albeit once), but this is gaining some steam again.
I personally, would like to see some integration. But sometimes, Google just tries to G+-ify everything a bit too much. Ex: Latitude and YouYube comments.
Hopefully this will just be a nice seamless transition of the GV sms messaging into Hangouts. I could see that as useful.

I just really hate the concept of them somewhat "making" you have a G+ account. Good for a business perspective I guess, but limits consumers. I have no desire to create a G+ account and I'm somewhat annoyed that it seems to be somewhat mandatory for more and more of Google's' Services.

Anyone know of alternatives?
I bought a jailbroken iPhone and have been just using a iPad sim card in it for the last little while. This way I pay about $10/month for enough data to get talk / text and the ability to surf the net a lot cheaper!
Edit: Or maybe I will still be able to do this once it is integrated with +.

Which AT&T plan are you using? I'm about to write up an article about going data-only and could use some more reference plans besides T-Mobile's.

I am actually in Canada, so I use Bell (This is the plan: http://www.bell.ca/Mobility/Cell_phone_plans/iPad_data_plans...). I guess it's actually usually around $20 (sometimes I don't go over the 10MB plan if I am on Wifi lots). This is the best I could find for something in Canada.
Let me see that article when you are done! If I move to the US I'll be looking to try the same thing there.
Edit: I am looking at Bolt. Looks awesome. I hope in a few years phone numbers just don't exist. (well, abstracted out).

Thanks for the link to Bell. We're adding a catalog of data-only plans around the world and tutorials about how to get them to the Bolt site.
And I agree about phone numbers. They should just be the IP addresses of communication. But nobody's developed a good-enough DNS equivalent (yet). We still all rely on a local cache of numbers in our phones' address books.

Cool! I have also heard of a few other related things:
http://www.fongo.com/ (And I thought there was another one out of the Waterloo area but can't find it, maybe it was this. )
http://www.freedompop.com/
https://angel.co/signal-mobile
Ya, exactly. When I meet someone. Why not be able to just start typing their name and add them that way. If they change their number it can be updated automatically so I have the new one.

I've been using Voice as my primary number since the GrandCentral days. They better not fuck that up too.
Edit: For those who say "it's free don't complain" I reply: "Then Google should bill me. I'll pay."

Voice never came to the UK anyway...

How long before you need a G+ account to use Google Search?

Any idea why Hangouts won't work on Firefox?

Introducing the Google+ Hangouts Car.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

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