With only two days left in 2024, I would like to point out that Google Voice was not updated with any consumer-facing features this year.
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Besides the Material You redesign at the start of this year, Google Voice has not seen too many user-facing (compared to enterprise) additions this year but is now adding spam text warnings.
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Google Voice is seeing a peculiar issue today where “high-resolution” photos and “other large media” cannot be uploaded or sent via SMS/MMS.
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While Voice is not a Google Workspace app, it’s sold as an “add-on” to the suite and managed by that team. Google Voice for Android is now getting a Material You redesign.
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Google Voice is a service that allows you to have a free phone number attached to your Google account and usable across many devices, but an issue today has left SMS and MMS messages on voice heavily delayed and/or arriving out of order.
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After introducing the feature last February, Google Voice for Android and iOS have removed Smart Reply suggestions that appeared at the bottom of messages.
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After adding Wi-Fi and cellular network switching, Google Voice is introducing a “Suspected spam caller” label on the incoming call screen.
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As of last week, Twitter looks to have dropped support for text message two-factor authentication (2FA) using Google Voice numbers.
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Google Voice rarely sees big updates that aren’t primarily enterprise-facing these days, but it is now getting “intelligent network switching” to improve call quality.
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With the release of Android 13, Google debuted a new image picker for Android that’s also available on older versions of the operating system. With a recent update, Google Voice is adding support for that new photo picker.
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If you were unable to place an outgoing call with Google Voice this afternoon, that was due to a problem “affecting a majority of users.”
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Alongside a slew of Meet announcements, Google Voice is getting a pair of new capabilities, most notably call recording, for enterprise subscribers. Google also previewed what’s coming to Spaces this year.
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Alongside other responses, Google announced this evening that its Voice VoIP service and Fi MVNO are waiving calling fees to Ukraine. The company also provided an update on Project Shield protections.
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AI-generated replies based on context have flourished over the years across Google apps and services. The latest example of Smart Reply is in Google Voice for Android.
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A little over three and a half years after Voice was massively redesigned, Google started telling original users that the legacy web version would stop receiving updates and encouraged them to migrate over. Legacy Google Voice is now set to be “phased out” from next month.
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Google Voice is primarily aimed at enterprise, and many of its new features are for paying Workspace customers. However, starting today, regular Google users in the US will also benefit from the addition of Voice “rules” for call forwarding and other custom actions.
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Google Voice is primarily a Workspace service at this point with new features focused on enterprise usage. That said, Google today updated Voice for Android with fairly straightforward app shortcuts.
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Google today announced a handful of usability enhancements to Voice on Android, iOS, and web. The updates primarily focus on improving the calling experience.
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Back in November, a slew of Google apps on iPhone and iPad added homescreen widgets. The latest iOS 14 widget is from Google Voice, which now also supports macro creation in the Shortcuts application.
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Back in October, Google detailed how it would move users of its previous messaging app to alternate services in 2021. As part of the migration, Google has shut down classic Hangouts integration with both Google Voice and Fi.
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One of the handier features of Google Voice is the ability to send text messages via your phone’s original number and messaging app. Unfortunately, Google Voice is now set to lose this message forwarding capability “soon.”
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Back in June, Google started letting you use Fi and Voice on the same account. A new Google Fi promotion is now incentivizing those longtime Voice users to join the MVNO now that they have the opportunity.
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Over a year after we first spotted it, Google Voice is rolling out a new feature to its mobile apps — the ability to see previews of vCard contact cards.
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At the tail end of 2018, we reported on Google’s plans to replace Hangouts with Chat and Meet. The company later confirmed the news and has since been moving enterprise users to those two apps. Google is now ready to start detailing how it will transition classic Hangouts users to a free version of Chat.
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