Google Voice? Great. Google Apps? Okay. Google Wave? Uh...

Three big announcements from Google (News - Alert), the company much in the news these days for one thing or another:


Google's Enterprise President Dave Girouard has announced the release a version of Google Voice for businesses, adding that the company will 'roll out Google Wave to all users who want it and deliver as many as 200 small features to Google Apps in 2010,' according to industry observer Clint Boulton.

In a bit more ambitious announcement, Electronista reported that Google 'could be the first to enable voice-to-voice translation for phones.'

Using 'the existing text conversion and voice recognition its search and from Android (News - Alert),' the industry journal explains, 'the company is developing a system that could recognize a spoken foreign language and recite it back in the user's native tongue.'

Don't hold your breath, though: A version that would 'work reasonably well' should be ready within a few years, company officials say.

One thing Google might want to add as a 'small feature' to Apps is make sure documents created on Google Docs can be attached and sent as Microsoft (News - Alert) Word files, as they claim. We've had so much trouble with that we've had to actually go back to using Word. Sigh.

Google Voice is used by at least one and a half million people in the United States. It gives users a unique number assigned by Google to route calls to home, work and mobile phones. It's free, but it doesn't 'connect calls from one PC to another, or between PCs and phones, or phones and phones,' Boulton says, while pointing out that Google did acquire Gizmo5 (News - Alert), 'whose softphone technology works like the popular Skype VoIP app' and 'plans to add these direct-calling capabilities to Google Voice.'

So far so good. But it appears Google's still intent on forcing Google Wave, their real-time collaboration platform famously described as 'a solution in search of a problem,' for all consumers and businesses in 2010.

As industry observer Tom Krazit reports, 'Separately, Google is building Google Wave as a similar stream of updates designed to improve collaboration. That service, which is unrelated to the Gmail status updates Google is preparing, is expected to become completely open sometime this year.'

You currently have to be 'invited' to join Google Wave. We have lots of extra invitations for Google Wave lying around, if you want one just let us know. Google officials say about a million people have accepted invitations to Wave so far, and from our experience, we bet that fully eleven of them are currently finding a good use for it.

'We are trying to learn and see what sort of use cases evolve from it and how it changes,' Girouard told Boulton, adding 'it's not nearly at the level of understanding and readiness of the core Google Apps services.' No it's not, probably because it's so deathly slow and clunky.