Newsletter
Google has just announced a huge update to their Google Voice apps, which bring new features and a new user interface, and the updates are rolling out right now. Google says that the updates are beginning their rollout today, but it will be a staged rollout so you may not see the update right away. However, everyone should see the updates in the “coming weeks”.
Google Voice has largely been forgotten for the past five years or so. In fact, that’s the last time they updated the Google Voice app, in any meaningful way. Which had led to many people thinking that Voice would go away. But that is not the case, as they have unveiled a huge update to the web app as well as mobile apps. According to the Google blog post that was published today, the new design is “cleaner, more intuitive”. Noting that the UI keeps everything organized, and your inbox now has separate tabs. These tabs are used for text messages, calls and voicemails. So you can easily browse through your calls, or your texts and not have them all lumped into your inbox. Additionally, conversations now stay in one continuous thread. Allowing you to see messages from a single contact in one place, instead of having multiple conversations appear from the same contact.
There is now group messaging and photo MMS support as well as in-notification replies (a feature that is part of Android Nougat, so you’ll need Android 7.x to take advantage of this). Google Voice has long had voicemail transcription available, it wasn’t (and still isn’t) always perfect, but they are now introducing Spanish transcription. Which is the second most popular language in the US – sorry to everyone outside of the US, still no global expansion for Google Voice yet – so it makes sense to add it. Google says that the Spanish transcription service “will improve accuracy over time”.
A pretty great update for Google Voice here, and by the sound of it, this may not be all that the team has in store for 2017. Google Voice also notes that you don’t need to take Voice out of Hangouts, and go back to the Google Voice app if you don’t want too, but the experience will likely be much better.
