Google Voice, despite its immense utility and huge popularity, is often ignored when it comes to product updates. That makes the occasional announcement -- like the one Google dropped this week -- all the more exciting. This time around, the company is expanding Google Voice with some important call customization features that allow users to tweak the service to best fit their needs.
A significant update to Google Voice this week added features like "Missed Call Reason" and "Call Drop Reason and Redial." For users that've been working with Google Voice on phones for years, these features could change the game. Imagine being able to see how that call you missed wasn't because you had your earbuds in and couldn't hear, but because "this device wasn't set to receive incoming calls," along with a simple fix - imagine how that might've changed how you handled odd situations in the past!
Google's approach to messaging has a reputation for being confusing, and so the search behemoth is trying to make a little clearer what's happening with Hangouts, Google Chat, and integration with other products. At the moment, Chat co-exists with Hangouts, with the latter also integrated with Google Fi and Google Voice, and you could also be using Chat within Gmail.
Siri is gaining a new talent, with deeper integration between iOS and Google Voice allowing calls and text messages to be sent via Apple's assistant. The new feature was quietly added to the latest update of Google Voice, and after a little setup is almost as easy to use as placing a call or sending a message via Siri through Apple's own dialer or iMessage.
If you think robocalls were nothing more than annoyances, the fact that a Google Voice feature is being killed because of them might change some people's minds. These unsolicited calls that could also be used to phish important personal data has been a scourge of consumers, regulators, and especially carriers for years and efforts to block and penalize them have ramped up in recent months. Unfortunately, Google sees no workaround for one feature and will instead be shutting down Google Voice's voicemail transcript forwarding because of it.
A Google Voice update released earlier this month appears to have caused certain audio-related features to malfunction. News of the problem has surfaced primarily from the Google Product Forums, where an increasing number of Google Voice users report an inability to use Bluetooth audio headsets and choose which speaker the call audio will be delivered through.
Google Voice remains a popular service that gets far too little attention. Users have been waiting months for a promised voice-over-IP (VoIP) feature, which entered beta testing around a year ago. Google was quiet on the test during that time, but a recent tweet prompted an update from the company: the new VoIP support is starting to roll out and will be available to everyone soon.
Google Voice sometimes feels like the forgotten service in Google's portfolio, but a new app update has given the calling service a quick refresh. Launched on iOS with an update this week, the new app won't blow anybody away with its new functionality, but it does make using Google Voice a little easier if it's your primary voice call system.
Google has released an update for Google Voice, the maker's free voice and texting service, that adds voicemail greeting support on mobile. This is one of the biggest additions since the major update Google released last year, enabling users to easily set up a custom voicemail greeting in the same way they'd create one for their smartphone or home voicemail system.
Google has no shortage of communication services and apps, each of them overlapping with one another in some way. Some of them haven’t been shown some love, sometimes even for years. Google Voice is perhaps the on that got the shortest end of the stick despite how useful it is. Now, however, Google seems to be preparing what might be the biggest update to the service in a long time. It is putting out a call for beta testers of its Wi-Fi and mobile data calling, a.k.a. VoIP that would, of course, overlap with other Google apps and services that offer the same functionality already.
Though it's arguably a niche issue, it is frustrating for Google Voice users: an issue that causes texts to be sent using one's regular phone number in certain cases. One of those instances is when using Hangouts as a default SMS app with a Google Voice number as the default SMS number. Many users report that, in this case, sending a text results in Hangouts sending the text with the user's regular phone number instead of Google Voice.
Google Voice users are complaining about some sort of issue that is preventing them from getting SMS texts. News of the bug first popped up online a couple days ago. Affected users explain that while they can successfully send out text messages using the service, replies sent to them don't appear in the account, effectively ruining the usefulness of the platform for many people.