IN PROGRESS

Google Voice

To make the presentation more clear, I've decided to do a complete re-write of my first paper in response to Professor Moglen's feedback. My initial comments on Google Voice ignored some significant Free Software alternatives and placed undue emphasis on the weaknesses in Google's privacy policy. In this revision, I'd like to clarify what it is that Google Voice provides (touching briefly on how each of us could do the same thing for ourselves without sacrificing our privacy) and then spend some time exploring what Google's purpose might be.

Anything Special?

After our class discussions regarding telephone service, one might be left wondering whether Google Voice actually has any unique capabilities. In other words, is there anything that Google Voice can do that I couldn't do myself with some Free Software? The answer, it appears, is very little. And if you are willing to pay a very small fee for some services, then there is even less that makes Google Voice unique.

First of all, anyone just looking to make free secure voice calls from one computer to another can do so just as easily as one uses email. There are a number of free softphone options depending on which operating system you use. Most of these support both audio and video. All of them are licensed under GPL. For Windows, you might consider VoxOx, Linphone, QuteCom, or VoiceChatter. For MAC, there is Blink, QuteCom, VoiceChatter, and others. If you are running Linux, the options are nearly unlimited, with Empathy, Twinkle, and Ekiga seeming to be the most popular choices. Setup here is virtually painless.

Most of the other features of Google Voice (e.g., call forwarding/redirecting, ringing multiple lines at once, handling incoming calls based on the caller) can be accomplished by a Free Software operating system called Asterisk@home (now known as Trixbox). This is quite a powerful tool capable of doing a lot more than routing calls. The details aren't important for our discussion here. The bottom line is that most of what Google (along with AOL, Skype, and Microsoft) offers for "free" (as in beer) can really be had for Free (as in speech).

From what I can tell, there are only a few things that make Google Voice unique. As you might expect, these are also the features that Google is probably using to monetize Google Voice. The first is voicemail message transcription. Google Voice does a pretty good job with this (although certainly not with competition from other paid subscription companies), no doubt based on its enormous (new) databank of English phrases (from the Google Books scanning project). The second unique feature is direct interface with GOOG-411 directory assistance, which provides location specific information on businesses. Finally, Google Voice provides free outbound calling to all phones in the United States and Canada. This last part may be what attracts most users, but it is really not much of an advantage, since there are very low cost alternatives (around 1000 minutes for $1 -- all you really need to pay for is the connection at the back end to the copper wire system).

Google's Purpose