Google Voice Launch Imminent: Witnessing A Milestone in Telephony

Google Voice Launch Imminent: Witnessing A Milestone in Telephony

by Evan Cooke, Twilio Co-Founder & CTO

The launch is a milestone, in many respects:

1. It demonstrates that there is still innovation in the phone 130 years after the first telephone call.
2. It illustrates the benefits of tight integration between the web and the traditional phone network.
3. It introduces IVR concepts to a broader customer audience.  The idea that anyone can provision phone numbers (like DNS names) and route calls between them with user-defined logic is incredibly powerful.

While Google Voice isn’t explicitly extensible, you can route your Twilio calls to and from your Google Voice account.  Imagine you want to add a more complex routing function that depends on your local database; you could route certain calls from your Google Voice account to your Twilio provisioned number and handle the logic with Twilio.

Build Your Own Google Voice with Twilio

Twilio also offers all the basic building blocks needed to create your own mini-Google Voice:

•     Inbound/Outbound calling
•     Keypad Input and conditional call routing
•     Call screening
•     Voicemail recording
•     Speech-to-Text transcription

If you have cool mashups you’ve build with Google Voice and Twilio, please let us know: help@twilio.com