Google Voice – Balancing Convenience with Privacy Issues

The Today show reported Thursday that Google Voice is now officially available to anyone wishing to sign up for the service.  Google Voice is a free service that provides a single number to ring to all your phones – home, work or mobile.  It also offers many enhanced calling features like call blocking and screening, voicemail transcripts, call conferencing, international calls, and more.

The service acts as a master phone number which you can then forward to whatever existing phone numbers you have.  It also offers a central voicemail box that can be accessed from any of your phones or via the Web both as an audio file or a transcribed written message.

The service offers free calling nationwide and international calling at a highly discounted rate.  This represents a major step for Google into telecommunications and is predicted to shake up the entire industry.

While the service does provide extreme convenience for people juggling work, family and personal schedules, along with multiple phones and phone numbers, some people have expressed concerns over privacy issues.  The centralized mailbox with transcribed messages provides a permanent record of all your voice mail messages. 

Google acquired the service in a July 2007 acquisition of GrandCentral.  The revamped and renamed service has been available to GrandCentral users since March of this year.  Although Today reported the service would launch nationwide Thursday, the Google Voice Web site still says the program is in beta and expected to launch soon. 

You can get more information and register with Google if you are interested in being notified when the service goes live.

Read a review of the service on WebWare.

See the video story from Today under Tech and Money stories here