Google Voice and the Future of Telephony

      by Wyatt Walter

When Google announced Google Voice, I looked at it, thought it was intriguing, and kept on my merry way. Now that it’s here and available by invite, I started looking at it and am realizing that it’s much bigger than I originally had thought. It’s not just another VoIP service, it’s a paradigm shift for telephones. It’s doing to phone routing what we have done with email. Your individual phones really just become clients that connect to a central call routing system of some sort.

The idea goes something like this: You have one number to give out to others. That number can ring at your desk at work, your home, and on your mobile phone. Depending upon who’s calling, you could even have it ring your spouse’s phone as well. That’s not a huge paradigm shift from what standard VoIP systems are today, but it allows you to have greater flexibility in using phones from outside your VoIP systems and multiple ones at the same time, meanwhile, adding some pretty sweet features to boot.

In the future, I can see this becoming the standard way of having a phone and simply buying a device to hook into the Internet from what is now your cell phone or home phone provider. Much the way Thunderbird or Outlook or your Blackberry hook into your mail server and pull down all the same mail, your phones simply listen for calls from one centralized place. This idea only makes sense since we really don’t want to have to keep track of multiple numbers and try multiple places to reach someone. We just want to reach them. We do the same with our searches, our documents, and with our emails. Why not with our phone calls?

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Filed under Tech Trends : Comments (1) : Jun 25th, 2009

One Response to “Google Voice and the Future of Telephony”

  1. Prepaid International Calling Card Says:
    February 10th, 2010 at 6:32 am

    I love Google Voice. There SMS feature really got me into it. I can send off free text messages to Bangladesh, India, and USA. It saves me good money on my texting program from Verizon Wireless because I can utilize that to send now. I think Google always does a wonderful job of giving users what they want and need. I have heard in the future they are mixing Voice with the Android. Plus they purchased a new VoIP company which they will mix with the other two to give some excellent features. I need to get me a Androind now haha.

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