Alongside a slew of Meet announcements, Google Voice is getting a pair of new capabilities, most notably call recording, for enterprise subscribers. Google also previewed what’s coming to Spaces this year.
Google says it has seen “renewed interest in cloud-based phone systems that untether people from legacy deskphones” amid hybrid work. Starting next month, enterprise Google Voice customers can record calls. This phone service is officially considered a separate add-on (and payment) to Workspace, and touts capabilities like spam blocking and voicemail transcription.
Standard subscribers will get on-demand recording, while the Premier tier also offers automated call recordings, which is a “top request from customers in regulated industries.”
Meanwhile, Google Voice SIP Link “later this year” lets customers “connect SIP trunks from their chosen telecommunications carrier via certified session board controllers from Oracle, Cisco, Ribbon, and Audiocodes.”
This will enable customers with operations outside our current coverage areas to move holistically to Google Voice. Admins will be able to easily manage these carrier-provided numbers alongside Google-provisioned numbers directly in the Google Admin Console.
Google today also talked about Spaces. It reiterated that inline threading in the coming weeks will allow responses to specific comments that don’t appear in the main stream. After enabling shared links last week, there will be a centralized place to search and join Spaces within your organization later this year. Google is also working on search improvements for Chat and Spaces, like improved file/conversation discovery and filter chips. Lastly, team size limits are increasing to 8,000 (from 400) and eventually 25,000 by the end of 2022. This is meant to allow for department and organizational announcements.