For Skype customers and just about anyone else who’s every typed phone numbers into a virtual dial pad, Gmail video and voice chat, even with its new ability to make free calls to cell and landlines, may warrant a big whoop. I had the dubious pleasure of retrieving voice mail through my email at some point in the late 1990s, so some of this telephony novelty has worn thin.
The biggest difference between the ancient branches on the email-voice evolutionary tree and the latest VoIP creations from Google, Skype and others is the Web and mobile calling, coupled with improved codecs. In other words, the overall technology has evolved in steps, not with a giant leap forward. It is slowly but surely achieving greatness.
There are already tens of million of existing Gmail users to talk and video chat with in direct computer-to-computer fashion. Google’s announcement last week to unite Google Voice (the service that rings all your phones) with Gmail and to throw in free outbound calls will probably add millions more. Most significantly, this service, is or will soon be available on Android phones as well.
Over the weekend, I tried Gmail’s existing video chat and made a free landline call. Conclusion: the new and improved Gmail service is a big deal for a number of reasons.Continue reading
Another weekend, another hackathon. But the one that was just held in Seatle concerned itself with Gov 2.0 projects. And Technoverse favorite Tropo was there, along with open data service provider Socrata.
I decided to take a break from watching Google-zilla’s next move. Yes, the search monster has some interesting news today with Voice Actions for Android. Terrific. But there are also capable speech rec apps outside their orbit, in the competitive world of what the FCC calls information services.
Is this what Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg metaphorically whispered into the Google founder’s ear? I’m still reeling from the Google-Verizon non-aggression pact and what it will mean for a competitive and open Internet. Some have pointed out that the proposal is merely a regurgitation of the FCC’s six freedoms for an open Internet.
Last Tuesday, Google introduced a translation service to its cloud-based word processing software, Documents. I abandoned the Microsoft Word ship a long time ago—I think my last release was Word 2002 — and use Documents for all my text entry. So this additional feature is a neat novelty that just makes my move from MS even sweeter.