Google Voice on iPhone :(
Like a few others, I am disappointed by Apple’s decision to prevent Google Voice for iPhone. I am not as upset as some, but do think the situation is unfortunate.
The startup I worked for a few years ago was doing something very similar to Google Voice, called VerbalOneNumber, which wasn’t as successful as GrandCentral (the predecessor of Google Voice), but my point is that I intimately understand the immense value potential here. The combination of Google Voice for inbound calls combined with consistent outbound presentation would prevent confusion. Our solution for VerbalOneNumber was to dial the service itself and use it to dial out, since it predated mobile devices such as iPhone, the G1/G2/pre etc. which are capable of doing this themselves. Perhaps Voice should do something similar anyway, in addition to having device specific applications. We dealt with it by identifying that a caller was dialing in from one of their designated numbers, asking for their PIN, and then presenting an internal speech recognition/DTMF menu structure to access voicemail, outbound calls etc. It worked fairly well, although voice quality (quality, drop outs etc.) on cell phones still isn’t anywhere near consistently decent enough to provide good results from speech recognition engines, but fast/responsive DTMF menus work very well indeed. They already provide click to call, which addresses the cases where you’re near a computer. However, what if you’re not ?
Hopefully this will get sorted out as a result of all the bad press. It would be very useful to take full advantage of Google Voice’s capabilities.