Google Gmail, along with Google’s other collaborative services, is out of beta after ~5 years and is now on to bigger and better things; such as their newly semi-opened product: Google Voice.

Its a remarkable service that brings to bear some of the conversational and historical features of Gmail.  Upon using, it all feels like a very natural progression and next-step to the unification of their communications platforms into a single interface in the near future.  Couple this with their voice recognition developments on the various mobile search platforms, and they are fitted to transcribe voicemails along with the emails that they are then able to data-mine for additional advertising revenue – similar to what they do with Gmail.

Google Voice is a service born from a company named GrandCentral that Google acquired in 2008. Its a service that centralizes phone number portability, call forwarding, text messaging and voicemail into a single solution that is completely free for in-country dialing, with reasonable rates for long distance use. It also brings to Google (and the masses) some of the typically corporate-only features of services referred to as Unified Messaging.

Unified Messaging capabilities are a likely baby-step into the future Google Wave platform and beyond.

Its brilliance on their part, and yet another extremely useful and free service for the rest of us. Forget Visual Voicemail.  If you have an iPhone, install the GV Mobile application, and see what Google is doing and how it will effect and eventually marry all of these technologies that are increasingly at our mobile fingertips.

What Google is doing here is the innovating benchmark that other companies will be forced to follow for years to come.

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