Google May 14 began rolling out its Google Voice phone management application to students, the search engine said. While the company is targeting college students with this new offer, a Google spokesperson told eWEEK any user with the .edu domain suffix may submit their e-mail address to procure an invite from the company. Google acquired Gizmo5 last year and is expected to take those assets and turn Google Voice into a Web calling service such as Skype. Google also expects to offer Google Voice to the enterprise through its Google Apps suite.
Google May 14 began rolling out its free Google Voice
phone management application to students in the United States, aiming to tap into
a potentially rich pool of hundreds of thousands of new users.
Google Voice lets users route calls to their home, work
and mobile phones from a special Google-granted number, and make low-cost
long-distance calls.
Students may now visit this
special Google Web page and enter an e-mail address that that ends in .edu. Students
will receive a Google Voice invite in their inbox within 24 hours. Only one
invite will be sent per e-mail address and Google Voice is only available in
the U.S.
"We've heard college students in particular really
appreciate getting their voicemail sent to their e-mail, sending free text
messages and reading voicemail transcriptions rather than listening to messages
(especially handy while in class),"
wrote Jason Toff of the Google Voice team.
While the company is targeting college students with this
new offer, a Google spokesperson told eWEEK any user with the .edu domain
suffix may submit their e-mail address to procure an invite from the company.
Google Voice users can do a lot more than just route
calls through multiple devices. Users can manage how they receive each call,
what voicemail message each caller receives and whether a call goes directly
to voicemail or to a particular device.
The app also boasts a voicemail service accessible
through a phone or a Web browser, allowing users to listen to messages, forward
messages, add the caller to an address book or block a caller as spam, among other
functions.
Google Voice is derived from assets Google gained in its
purchase of GrandCentral and is a promising Web service to an arsenal of Web
apps that includes Gmail, Docs and other collaboration tools. Google in March 2009
formally unveiled Google Voice for closed testing among existing GrandCentral
users.
Google began
rolling out the service to select invitees in June 2009 and engineers have helped the service evolve in the past
year, adding new features and improving its transcription capabilities.
Google even
created a special version of Google Voice to run on Apple's iPhone after the
computer maker
barred the original native Google Voice app from its App Store for competing
with the iPhone.
More than 1.4 million users have
signed up to use the
service since its broader launch, and the company has grand plans for the app.
Google
acquired Gizmo5 last year and is expected to take those assets and turn Google
Voice into a Web calling service such as Skype. Google also
expects to offer Google Voice to the enterprise through its Google Apps suite.
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