GrandCentral: Free Visual Voicemail

Written on March 2, 2008  |  by RP Mickler  |  Leave a Comment  | 

Google has taken the next step in cloud computing by offering free visual voicemail.

GrandCentral is a new service that has been acquired by Google. Using GrandCentral allows you to create a voicemail box that can be used to direct telephone calls. The engine records the voicemail and makes it visible through GrandCentral’s interface – an Adobe Flash interface, or, a moble interface for phones.

A lot of features wrapped into GrandCentral:

1. Call screening and blocking features.
2. Notifications via SMS and email.
3. Call records and logging.
4. Selective ringtones.
5. Variable greetings.
6. Webcall button.
7. Online address book.
8. Visual voicemail.

I really like the webcall button. Apparently it screens the number so it can’t be read by spammers, but a button for calling you can be placed as a widget on your website or blog. Then, a VOIP interface is initialized via the web to capture the voice call. I’d probably use it for that purpose, as well as the ability to perhaps direct students from all of the universities I work with to a single inbox.

I don’t think GrandCentral replaces the voicemail functions of the cell phone. I do think that it allows for a centralized inbox and flexible screening tool which would be practical in concentrated web channels; it also offers the consolidation of distributed voicemails which could be a real time-saver. I think GrandCentral could be looked at as a “not quite as functional” Skype variant except the voicemail service is free.

And in Google tradition, GrandCentral is free – and, of course, to the savvy small business, free is a very good price – although they’re currently undergoing a selective registration process, and, availability for GrandCentral is limited to some specific markets. Signed up for it but the number hasn’t been approved yet. Keep your eyes pealed; apparently I can hitch it into the blog relatively easily! We’ll see…

R