Google Voice and Gmail are sort of merging

Two new little Google Voice features just made their way into Gmail. A new option lets text messages sent to Google Voice show up as e-mail messages in Gmail. You can reply to messages from Gmail, too, which makes it a nice platform for carrying on a text message conversation.

Google Voice text messages can now be read and replied to from within Gmail.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Also, there's a new Labs feature in Gmail that lets you play your Google Voice voicemail messages from inside the Gmail viewer. Previously, Gmail would send you the text transcript of your message, but if you wanted to play the audio file, it would open a new browser window to do so.

The Google Voice player is now embedded in Gmail. This is a good thing, since the Gmail voicemail transcription service is woefully inaccurate.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Small snags: Although the features are thematically linked, they're enabled differently. The SMS feature is turned on within the Settings tab of Google Voice; the Gmail voicemail player needs to be enabled from withing the Labs tab of Gmail. Also, while receiving and replying to Google Voice SMS messages in Gmail is now easy, I didn't see how one could initiate a Google Voice SMS conversation from within Gmail even with the SMS feature turned on.

I like where this is going. I'm still not a huge fan of the Gmail user interface, but it's great to be able to see and manage e-mails, voicemails, and SMS messages all in one place. It will be interesting to see if Google Wave gets similar Universal Inbox features.

Google announced these enhancements on the Google Voice Blog (the SMS feature) and the Gmail Blog (voicemail player).

[sevenalive]

Either Google Voice does a terrible job at Speech to Text, or the person that left the voicemail needs to go back to school and maybe enter in a special needs class.

[ZetaZeta_]

Sound quality isn't exactly that great over a telephone, and most commercial text to speech applications need to "learn" your voice, or they only look for a few commands or sounds that are relevant. The iPhone speech-to-text that I've seen a video of works well, but I don't know if it has to learn your voice, and also the Microphone is local and probably higher quality than at least an analog handset, and processing took 10 seconds for about a line of text. (Not sure on this, and I also don't know where the processing of the text is... on a server (more likely) or on the phone). You want a potentially long phone call to have a text version available fairly quickly sometimes, although accuracy is more important than speed, imo.
Also, a caller doesn't necessarily anticipate their voicemail being transcribed, either, and won't try to enunciate, probably.

Anyway, in short, speech to text for a phone calls need a lot of work, and there are probably limits to their accuracy.

I guess your voicemail greeting could be "Please enunciate and speak loudly, crisply, and clearly into the receiver."
>:D

[TheSymposium]

To initiate an SMS conversation from within Gmail, just type in the 10-digit telephone number into the "CHAT" searchbox, and you'll be prompted to send an SMS. This is a Gmail feature; however, not a GVoice feature, so you can do this for any 10-digit telephone number, not just those you use via GVoice.

If you enter mobile telephone numbers into your contacts' information, typing in their name into the search box in the Chat box will enable you to send SMS as well.

In order to prevent abuse, I think you're only allowed to send 2-3 SMS before being cut off, unless the person you're SMSing to responds to your SMS.

[Jive Turkey]

Is that country-specific? I just tried it and it didn't prompt for SMS, just chat and e-mail. I'm in Australia.

[Police_States_of_America]

google voice SO needs voip functionality

[forever4now]

One of the MAJOR advantages of web apps is that new features & mash-ups can be rolled out gradually (low user impact), versus the big bang roll-outs typically associated with desktop app upgrades (high user impact).

[lian996]

I really hope Google Voice starts to support porting of numbers to their service soon. As that is really the only thing holding me back from embracing it fully and completely.

[atish505]

When is Google Voice coming out of the invite only mode? What is the firm launch date?

[CaBrWe]

I agree with lian996 - I am so close to using this as my primary - if I could switch my number. This feature helps and so would better transcripting.

[whitewater]

The problem I'm having with Google Voice is that for incoming calls, when I answer my cell phone, it hangs up the caller and sends them to voicemail, then I have to call the person back. I've already reported this but it doesn't look anywhere closer to being fixed, so right now this makes Google Voice useless for me.

[EricFriedman]

I have the same garbled voice transcription problems - hopefully this will also allow more people to flag how poorly the transcription service is when people leave voicemails.

[rimesparse]

"I'm still not a been a huge fan..."

(Might wanna fix.)

[rafe]

Done, and thanks!

[fjpoblam]

Does this mean that, soon, gmail will not be available on an iPhone?

[xngk]

Don't forget about Google Wave! I could see it easily becoming the ultimates mix of email, google voice, social networking and google docs. I would not be surprised if google was going to turn all of its projects into one amazing one. Imagine going on one site or loading one phone app, and instantly have EVERYTHING people are using to contact you.