Call Recording Featured Article

Industry observer Jessica Dolcourt likes Google (News - Alert) Voice. "I really do," she insists, adding "now that the search giant has thrown open the gates to make Google Voice free for anyone in the U.S., many more people will get the opportunity to pick and praise."

Yet it's not perfect. What is, other than Golden Retrievers? "Inconsistencies, especially with the computer-aided transcription of voice mail messages and with phone number mess-ups in the Google Voice mobile apps, have continuously disappointed," Dolcourt notes.

Google Voice is one of Google's surprisingly few success stories recently, with the burning carcasses of Wave and Buzz stinking up the landscape. Google is anxious for it do well to keep the company on schedule for absolute and total world dominance. It's pulling its weight, having "more than a million subscribers while it was still in invite-only private mode," Dolcourt writes, judging correctly that those are by far the most forgiving one million users possible on the planet.

"I suspect millions more callers will be less forgiving once the thrill of accessing another hot Google service wears off," she says.

As one of those million forgiving fans, then, Dolcourt offers Google, in the spirit of friendship, four areas it could, um, improve on:

Porting. "You can sign over your phone's default voice mailbox to Google Voice --this lets you read voice mail messages online, via e-mail, or via text, and respond," Dolcourt says, explaining that conditional call forwarding, as it's called, is a good workaround, "but there are limitations: no call forwarding to multiple cell phones and landlines, and no call screening, call recording, call blocking, or conference calls."

Accurate transcription. This gets expensive if you're asking people to sit and transcribe calls. Still, Dolcourt says, "Google should take YouMail's (News - Alert) cue and keep the basic digital transcriptions free while ramping up its service with tiered pricing options for those who seek absolute accuracy."

Uniform mobile apps. "Thanks to its hearty integration into the Android (News - Alert) operating system, Google Voice for Android is by far the best Google Voice experience for mobile phones," she writes. "Now that Google Voice is sure to go mainstream, developers should make a concerted effort to standardize the app for the major mobile platforms."

International support: "Google Voice is currently U.S.-only… Google will never truly achieve world domination" without international support.