A few days ago there was a nasty rumor going around that Google had just purchased Skype competitor Gizmo5. Funny thing about rumors is that sometimes they're true. Like, for instance, this one.

Gizmo5 offers a variety of tools that let users make cheap calls from a PC to a phone, or free calls from computer to computer. Google says that Gizmo5's engineers will be joining the Google Voice team. The company isn't announcing exactly what that means in terms of new features yet. But considering Google Voice currently lets you screen, receive, and record calls, I'd be shocked if Google and Gizmo5 weren't planning to add the ability to make calls.

For now, Gizmo5 has stopped accepting new user registrations, but current customers will be able to continue using the service. The same thing happened when Google acquired GrandCentral a few years ago to create the service now known as Google Voice.

Google Voice is a service that lets you check your voicemail on the web, receive transcripts of voicemails via email, screen calls, and give out a single number to all of your contacts that they can dial to reach you on your cell, home phone, work number, or any other phone you use.

But there's one relatively high barrier to entry. Well, two if you count the fact that it's still in private beta. But the main barrier is that while people can ring your existing number by dialing a Google Voice number, up until now it's been a one way street. They couldn't dial your cellphone number and automatically transfer into your Google Voice account. And that's meant that you probably had to maintain two or more voicemail accounts.

But now Google is taking a baby step toward number portability. When new users sign up, they have a choice of asking for a new Google Voice number or using an existing phone number.

While you won't get all of the features of Google Voice if you sign up with an existing number, you will be able to direct all of your voicemail messages to your Google Voice inbox. What this version of Google Voice doesn't offer is the ability to have all calls made to that number forwarded to multiple phones.

If you already have a Google Voice account and phone number, you can add Google voicemail to existing mobile phones from supported carriers. This doesn't appear to be an option for non-mobile phones. For instance, I have Google Voice configured to ring my SkypeIn number and I would love to consolidate my Skype and Google voicemail boxes, but there's no easy way to do that yet.

Google Voice is an internet service that lets people make, receive private phone calls. Google.com is a search engine that makes it easy for users to find just about anything stored on the internet. See how these two things might possibly not play well together?

Earlier today Boy Genius Report noticed that if you did a search for site:https://www.google.com/voice/fm/* on Google, you found a few dozen Google Voice messages. As of this afternoon you can still find those search results. Click on them and you can listen to voicemail messages or read the automated transcripts.

It turns out things weren't quite as bad as they may have looked at first. Google wasn't including all Google Voice messages in its public search index. But the company was crawling messages that users had posted publicly on the web.

But after this information became public today Google told Boy Genius Report that it would begin restricting crawling of even these messages, allowing users to post their voicemail messages on personal blogs without worrying quite so much about the whole world finding them (although if you're posting it on the internet maybe you should expect the whole world to be able to find it).

Remember in the early days of Gmail when invites were hot property? Every new user who signed up for Google's email service got a few invitations to share with friends and the internet was flooded with invites being swapped in user forums, blog comments, and even eBay auctions.

Well, now we can relive those golden days, as Google is about to begin giving out invites to Google Voice users. Google Voice is a free service that lets you link all of your phone numbers to one number that you can give out. When someone calls that number, all of your phones will ring (or you can configure it to ring only certain phones at certain times), and if you miss a call you'll be able to check your voicemail from the web or get an automated transcript in your email.

Google Voice has been in private beta for a while now, and the only way to get in on the action was to request an invitation from the signup page and wait. Of course, users could send out invitiations to one another in the early days, back when the service was called GrandCentral and run as a separate company. But since Google purchased GrandCentral, invites have been hard to come by.

Google is rolling out the invite feature gradually. It's not in my account yet. But the company says that over the next few weeks existing users should notice a new "Invite a friend" link on the left-hand side of their inboxes.

Google Voice is a free service that lets you route all of your phone calls through a single number, access your voicemail on the web, receive automated transcripts of your voicemails via email, and make VoIP phone calls. There are just two catches:

1. It's still in private beta, meaning you need to request an invitation to use the service.
2. Google Voice is only available in the US.

Up until today, that second point would have read continental US. But today Google expanded the service to include Hawaii and Alaska. Google Voice users can now make free calls to and from Hawaii and Alaska. And you can forward your Google Voice phone number to a phone in either of those two states.

It's not exactly the international rollout many people are waiting for. But it's a baby step.

Before there was Google Voice, there was GrandCentral. In 2007 Google acquired the internet telephony service that lets you ring all your phones from a single number, record calls, and set caller permissions. Eventually Google relaunched the service as Google Voice and added nifty new features like automatic voicemail transcription. But if you preferred the old interface you didn't have to upgrade... until now.

Tomorrow GrandCentral is shutting down and existing users will need to migrate their data to Google Voice if they want to keep using the service (and their phone numbers).

If you don't have a GrandCentral or Google Voice number, you can sign up at google.com/voice, but the service is still invite-only, which means you may have to wait a little while for an invitation before you can start using the service.

[via Lifehacker]

After Apple decided not to allow Google's phone app, Google Voice, into its application store, the FCC opened an inquiry into Apple's reasons for rejecting Google Voice, and its notoriously inconsistent app store approval policies. Now, Apple has not only responded to the FCC's questions, but publicly released the response on its website. Here are some of the highlights:

• Apple claims it didn't reject Google Voice, but continues to study it. The semantic distinction between "rejected" and "not approved" doesn't offer much comfort to Google Voice users who would really like an easy way to use the service from their phones."
• The reason Google Voice hasn't been approved (yet?) is that "it appears to alter the iPhone's distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone's core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail."
• AT&T was not at all involved in the decision not to approve Google Voice, Apple says: "Apple is acting alone and has not consulted with AT&T about whether or not to approve the Google Voice application. No contractual conditions or non-contractual understandings with AT&T have been a factor in Apple's decision-making process in this matter."

Although Google Voice isn't a voice-over-IP app, the FCC also asked Apple some questions about those. Apple answered that it does have an agreement with AT&T not to allow apps that can originate VOIP calls using AT&T's network. Apple also appears to be worried that the Google Voice app passed users' contacts from the iPhone's Address Book to Google's servers without alerting users, but I can't imagine too many people who would sign up for a service like Google voice would be worried about that.

The inquiry is still in its early stages, and it's too early to make a good prediction about what will happen. So far, I agree with Daring Fireball's read on the situation: Apple's decision seems to be all about its competitive relationship with Google and maintaining control over the phone experience on its own device.

Google Voice lets users make free calls to phone numbers in the United States. And starting this week, users can also make free calls to Canada, a feature that was available in GrandCentral before Google bought the service and turned it into Google Voice.

The only catch is that you can only make those free calls if you're in the US, because Google Voice isn't available in other countries yet.

In order to make a free phone call, you can login to your web-based inbox and hit the Call button, use a mobile application, or call your own Google Voice number from a registered phone and hit #2 to place a call.

Google Voice may have been rejected as an iPhone app, but you can still make Google Voice calls less of a pain. Try the Google Voice Speed Dial Bookmarklet Generator from Ironic Sans to speed up the process of calling your contacts from Google Voice. Once you've used to it save speed dial URLs for your contacts, you can save them in a bookmarks folder or assign them to contacts in your iPhone's Contacts app.

A couple of important notes from David Friedman of Ironic Sans: the first bookmark you set up takes a bit more time than the other ones, and the "submit" button doesn't mean you're submitting any contact data to his servers. The bookmark is created locally using Javascript. Someday Google may implement its own speed dial solution, but for right now, this generator is a lot better than nothing.

The FCC sent inquiry letters to Apple, AT&T and Google as part of an investigation into the rejection of Google Voice from Apple's App Store. The rejection was one of the now-typical "duplicates the functionality of one of Apple's apps" affairs, and the FCC is pressing for details on how Apple's seemingly inconsistent approval process actually works. Was Apple moving at the behest of AT&T to get rid of an app that might cut into the phone company's profits? Our sister site, TUAW, has the details on the questions each player was asked.

For Apple: What are the actual rules for app approval? Why was Google Voice rejected? Have any VoIP apps been accepted to the store? (TUAW points out that this question seems misplaced, because Voice is not a VoIP application.) Was AT&T consulted on the decision to reject Google Voice?

For Google: Have other Google apps been accepted to Apple's store? What's the approval process for Google's own Android app store? Are there other ways Google Voice might work on the iPhone without the app?

For AT&T: Did AT&T have anything to do with the rejection of Google Voice? Are any VoIP applications running on AT&T's network? What role does AT&T have in approving 3G-enable applications?

The companies have until August 21 to respond to these questions, and the answers should be quite revealing. It's funny that it might take an FCC inquiry to get to the bottom of Apple's mysterious, fickle-seemingly app store policies. iPhone developers will be watching closely.

Apple doesn't particularly like it when developer release applications that compete directly with Apple's iPhone software. That's why you won't find any full featured web browsers in the App Store. And apparently it's why you also won't find any mobile apps for using Google Voice.

Of course, up until recently, there was an unofficial Google Voice app called GV Mobile that let you make and receive calls and access your Google Voice voicemail. But the developer says his app was removed, and Apple says it's because it duplicates features that come with the iPhone. Apparently Google ran into the same problem when the company tried to submit an official Google Voice application to Apple 6 weeks ago. TechCrunch reports that the app was rejected.

It makes sense for Apple to block a program like Google Voice, but not because it competes with Apple's software. Instead, Google Voice essentially lets users get around some of AT&T's fees by sending free text messages and making cheap phone calls, even to international locations.

But at a time when Google is releasing Google Voice apps for BlackBerry, Android, and other other platforms, does Apple really want to be the holdout here? Especially since Apple has already approved a Skype application, which also duplicates some of the iPhone's native features while letting users send messages and make phone calls without paying additional fees to AT&T.

[via TUAW]

If you've been wondering how Google plans to make money off of Google Voice, the company's voicemail, telephone routing, and general VoIP applications, here's a hint: advertising. That's pretty much how Google makes all of its money. The question is, what kind of advertising?

I'd kind of assumed that Google would place contextual ads on the Google Voice web site next to transcripts of your voicemail messages, much the way it does with Gmail. And it still might. But Google has also filed a patent for a system that would insert audio ads into your phone calls. The patents also describes a system for determining the caller's location in order to geographically target the ads.

It's not necessarily as obtrusive and annoying as it sounds. The ads would be played while the phone is ringing and you're waiting for a person to pick up, or at other times when you're not talking. It's not entirely clear whether Google will roll out this feature. I personally would rather not listen to adds every time I make a call, so I'm kind of hoping the company doesn't.

I also think if Google were going to insert audio ads into your phone calls, it would have been nice of the company to roll out this feature before launching the service. But Google Voice is still only open to beta testers with invitations, so you could argue that there's time to make a major change like this before launching the service more publicly.

[via Unwired View]

Google has launched a Google Voice application for BlackBerry and Android phones. The app lets Google Voice users make calls or send SMS from their mobile phones using their Google Voice phone number. But the more exciting feature is the ability to check your Google Voice voicemail on a mobile device, complete with automatic message transcripts.

Of course, you don't need a mobile app to have all calls made to your Google Voice number directed to your cellphone or any other phone. But when you add that feature to the mobile client, Google Voice is starting to look like a pretty full-featured service for managing your phone calls and text messages on a mobile device.

There's just one catch for BlackBerry users. While the mobile app can tie into a Google Android phone's native address book for making calls and sending text messages, this feature is absent from the BlackBerry version. So if you've already got most of your contacts in your BlackBerry address book, you may need to spend some time importing the information to Google Voice as well.

Google Voice mobile is available for download from the Android Market, or from m.google.com/voice. There's no app available for iPhone, Windows Mobile, Symbian, or other platforms yet. You can find a bunch of screenshots of the Google Android version of Google Voice Mobile at Lifehacker.

After what seems like an eternity in closed private testing, Google is starting to send out beta invitations for Google Voice (formerly GrandCentral). The company also reportedly snagged about a million US phone numbers to use for the service, which lets users give out a single phone number that will ring all their phones and record, transcribe, and email voicemail messages.

Those new phone numbers will come in handy for new customers. But what if you're an existing user looking to change your number? I signed up for GrandCentral when I lived in Brooklyn and got myself a number with a 718 area code. Now I live in Philadelphia and feel silly giving out that number.

Now Google is offering users like me a chance to change our numbers. You'll have to pony up $10 for the change, but since most of Google Voice's features are free, that seems like a pretty reasonable price.

When you change numbers, all calls made to your old number will continue coming to your new number for 90 days.

[via TechCrunch]

Google is beginning to send out invites to people who signed up to try Google Voice. The service is still in private beta, but this is the first time new users will be able to gain access to the service since Google purchased the technology from GrandCentral. Up until now, only former GrandCentral users have been able to use Google Voice.

Google Voice allows users to route all of their phone calls through a central phone number. For instance, if you have a home phone, cellphone, and work number, you can link them all to Google Voice and just give out a single number to your contacts. When they call your Google Voice number, all of your phones will ring. You can also use the service to check your voicemail online, transcribe voicemails and forward them to your email account, screen calls, or perform a whole slew of other nifty features.

As part of the wider launch, Google will begin sending out invites to users who signed up to request them. New users will be able to choose a new phone number, hopefully in a local area code. Google also has a new tool that will let you try to snag a phone number that matches a word or phrase (see the image above for an example).

If you haven't already requested an invite yet, Google is still accepting requests.