When you think about Google, it’s seen first and foremost as a search engine service given its market dominance.

Sure, Google is playing in other markets – e-mail (GMail), productivity suites (Google Docs), blogs (Blogger, Google Reader) but search continues to be Google’s bread and butter.

For telecom watchers, however, it would be a good idea to keep a close eye on what Google is doing in the voice market.

A few years ago, Google acquired a start-up called GrandCentral, which made its mark by offering users a single, unified telephone number with the area code of their choice.

For people with home, office and mobile phones, GrandCentral was a wonderful solution because when any of your numbers were called, all phones rang at the same time.

While there was some initial excitement about the Grand Central purchase, Google’s voice plans faded into the background, although there has been speculation Google might be interested in buying Skype from eBay.

Recently, however, Google’s voice strategy has become more obvious and ambitious. In particular, Google has turned GrandCentral into a public beta, which means anyone can sign up for a free Google Voice account. (Note: Google Voice is only currently available in the U.S but, hopefully, that will change soon).

Another part of Google’s voice strategy will likely be Google Wave, which will be released later this year. Google Wave is being positioned as a personal portal where you will be able to do everything and anything. There’s no doubt voice will be a key part of Google Wave – the question being whether Google Voice will be the platform or services created by third-parties using the API.

For more on Google Voice, check out New York Times’ columnist David Pogue’s recent column and a story in the New York Daily News about 10 reasons why Google Voice will “rock the world”.

Source : http://www.thetelecomblog.com