Thanks for all of your feedback on last week's Hangouts launch. We just posted an update on Google Voice and Hangouts on Google+.

Posted by Nikhyl Singhal, Director of Product Management, Real-Time Communications

(Cross posted on Gmail Blog)

With the big day right around the corner, activity in the North Pole is hitting a fever pitch. Yet, Santa will always make time to send a personalized holiday phone calls from Santa to your friends and family via his personal Google Voice line (aka Send a Call from Santa).

To send a message, find the Call Center in Santa’s Village. You will be prompted to answer a few fun questions, then Google Voice will do the rest! The system will create a tailored phone call from Santa himself, and send it to whomever you wish.


To get an idea of what to expect, listen to a sample message.

And don’t forget: If you want to keep up with Santa as he travels around the globe delivering presents on Christmas Eve, you can track his journey on Google Maps’s Santa Tracker.

Happy holidays from all of us at Google!

Posted by Patrick Glover, North Pole Operator

Google Voice helps you customize how you treat callers by giving you the ability to play a custom greeting for your parents or send your chatty neighbor straight to voicemail.

Many users have asked us for controls aimed at people who are NOT in their address book. So today, we’re adding two groups of callers for Google Voice users:

• People in your address book: this allows you to customize the experience of all contacts in your address book. This also works by exclusion. For example, you can set a special greeting just for people in your address book, or screen anyone not in your address book.
• For anonymous callers: these are callers who do not have a caller ID. They sometimes appear as unknown, or restricted, depending on why the caller’s number is not shown. You can use this group to for example screen any call without a caller ID.

Those two new groups are specific to Google Voice and can be managed from the group tab.



As always, we hope you like this new feature and welcome your feedback.

Posted by Tom Ford, Software Engineer

When we asked our users what features they’d like to see in Google Voice, we heard a lot of different answers. And we listened very closely to all of them. A few themes stood out for us: you’d like to see us bring more awesome features to your phones, and you’d like to see Google Voice in other countries. But we asked ourselves: is this ambitious enough? Surely we can do something even better than that. And that’s when the future became clear to us: Dogs and cats. Texting. Together.

Introducing Google Voice...For Pets.

You might ask yourself, “Google Voice? For my pets? How is that even possible? There’s only a few bluetooth headsets that can fit my dog, and they’re so expensive!” The secret is in our special Voice Communication Collars. The collars fit around your pet's neck and use a series of sensors to record audio directly from your dog or cat’s vocal cords, using technology originally developed for NASA spacesuits. Using your WiFi network, audio messages are uploaded to your Google Voice account within seconds. Alternately, a tiny micro-LED emitter built into the collar can project a keyboard onto the floor, so your pet can tap their front paws to send text messages. With a little training, your beloved Fluffy will be able to let you know exactly what she wants every minute of every day. Wherever you go.


We didn’t just stop there. Voicemails from your pet would be pretty silly if you haven’t been trained how to understand cat or dog. Thankfully, we’ve solved that problem too. We took our voicemail transcription engine and combined it with millions of adorable pet videos from the Internet, training it to understand our furry friends. Now our transcription engine can now translate cat meows or dog growls into English!


Thanks to our mobile apps, you can always keep in touch with your pets, no matter how far away they are.



We’re rolling out Google Voice for Pets in a limited beta. Click here to apply to be one of the first pet owners to try our special communication collars.

Posted by Alex Wiesen, Software Engineer

To help make it even easier for you to organize your contacts, today we’re adding Google+ Circles to Google Voice. Circles give you more control over how you manage your callers; for example, calls from your “Creepers” circle can be sent straight to Voicemail, only your “College Buddies” circle will hear you rap your voicemail greeting, or you can set your “Family” circle to only ring your mobile phone.

You can customize your Circles settings by visiting the Groups & Circles tab in your Google Voice settings.

Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Posted by Tom Ford, Software Engineer

Sometimes the times that we’re offline can be our most productive times. However, whether on a plane or out of range of coverage, it’d still be nice to be able to draft text messages. With this new app, you can now compose new messages (single recipients for now) while offline and the app will automatically queue them and send them out when you’re connected again.

We hope you enjoy this new feature.

Posted by Yong Hoon Choi, Software Engineer

MMS has been one of the constant feature requests since we launched Google Voice and we’ve been hard at work trying to make this happen.

Today, we're happy to announce that we've made the first step in our efforts to bring this feature to our users. Google Voice users are now able to receive pictures and other multimedia messages from Sprint subscribers. The multimedia attachments will display on their mobile forwarding phone and in their email inbox when they enable text to email forwarding in their Google Voice settings. We are also planning on making them display in the Google Voice inbox.

We are working with other mobile operators to make this work across all mobile phones and will update our users as more and more operators offer support for this.

Posted by Ilya Frank, Senior Software Engineer

As you may have noticed, the Google Voice blog looks a lot different today. That’s because we—along with a few other Google blogs—are trying out a new set of Blogger templates called Dynamic Views.

Launched today, Dynamic Views is a unique browsing experience that makes it easier and faster for readers to explore blogs in interactive ways. We’re using the Classic view, but you can also preview this blog in any of the other six new views by using the view selection bar at the top left of the screen.



We’re eager to hear what you think about the new Dynamic Views. You can submit feedback using the “Send feedback” link on the bottom right of this page, or just send us a message.

If you like what you see here, and we hope you do, we encourage you to try out the new look(s) on your own blog—read the Blogger Buzz post for more info.

Posted by Michael Bolognino, Product Marketing Manager