PATRICK WYNN: Hi, I'm Patrick Wynn,
and I'd like to talk to you about Google Voice.
We'll go through some of our most recent updates,
a little about how you can put the service into practice,
and what our customers have shared with us, as well.
It goes without saying, COVID-19 has created an immense impact
to our global community.
More people have been socially distanced
and ultimately working from home or other remote locations.
This is the new reality.
Google Workspace has shown to be an effective method of working
remote, and we've worked hard to ensure Voice is no exception.
In fact, we noticed more and more customers
are seeing this new style of work as a useful opportunity
to switch to a work from anywhere business telephony
solution.
This means team members can make and receive
phone calls from wherever they're signed into Workspace.
Not only has this been happening in the business world,
but it's surprised us how many of those in education
made the switch to Voice, as well.
Our goal with Voice is to make phone calls
at work a delightful experience through the power
of Google innovation and scale.
At Google, we've worked really hard to understand
and process spoken language, such as with Google Assistant,
that we can put to use in tools like Google Voice.
We take that well-honed technology,
like text-to-speech, to make updating inbound calling
menus quick and easy.
You don't have to upload another voice prompt when your business
hours change, for example.
Our unique speech-to-text processing
provides features like voicemail transcription
across multiple languages.
Also, we can protect you from unwanted calls
through the refined machine learning
models of other popular tools, like Google Dialer and Gmail.
Behind the scenes, Voice is part of a much larger telephony
platform that powers billions of minutes and messages
from services like Google Fi and Meet.
This is important because phone calls have
quite a bit of nuance to them.
They don't work quite the same as other media like video.
So let's go through a few of the more visible updates we've made
to Voice over the past year.
A lot of Workspace users leave Gmail open on their desktop,
so this is a convenient way to make calls and avoid
you missing those important incoming calls.
Once Voice for Workspace is activated,
Gmail will be ready to ring.
On that note, we've also made it easier
to see why you might have missed a call.
For example, if you have calls directed
to voicemail outside working hours set,
say, in Google Calendar.
On the theme of availability, we've also taken things a step
further and combined our call forwarding technology that's
been part of Voice for over 10 years
with our feature-rich Voice Over Internet experience.
When you add another linked phone
number like that of your mobile device,
you can make and receive calls over the internet
or through a carrier call.
Voice will predict which path is best based on your connection,
and will also preserve your caller ID info even when
forwarding a call through your mobile carrier.
This is a great way to stay connected when you only
have internet access, or your internet connection
isn't as reliable.
If you have a main line number for your organization
or a specific resource line, you can now
upload your own audio clips in addition
to the natural-sounding text-to-speech
prompts we've always provided.
We also give you an automatic transcription
of the uploaded file to help you identify the clip.
And earlier this year, Voice added Belgium, Italy,
and Germany to the other 11 countries already available.
At the same time, we've also launched the ability
for Google Meet customers in these countries
to access hundred dialing countries
and make calls to the globe.
This uses the same architecture as Google Voice
behind the scenes.
Last year we launched support for ring groups,
similar to hunt groups.
These are the industry norm for how
you would distribute calls amongst members
in a particular team.
So this year we added some popularly
requested features, such as specifying
the ring group ordering and the maximum time for a call
to ring.
And we realize with this degree of configuration and control,
unintended breakages in a setup can occur.
Admins can receive alerts now when a configuration change is
inadvertently stopped or a ring group or auto attendant might
not be working, with details that
are also shown in the Admin console
to help the Admin correct it.
For example, an auto attendant might
break because a particular call flow points to a user that
has since been removed.
It certainly doesn't make sense to direct calls
to a number that is no longer active.
As with much of the rest of Workspace,
we added eDiscovery support to voice
with Google Vault. Your legal or compliance
team can access Vault through a dedicated interface
and can build legal matters, initiate searches, legal holds,
and export records across Workspace,
and now including Voice.
This may include things like transcribed voicemails,
as well as call records.
So these are just a few of the recent updates,
but it's useful to see how some of these features
come together with a demo.
Let's see how this works.
As a Workspace Admin, you can add Voice by going
to voice.google.com/about and selecting the plan you want.
You'll be taken through the Workspace add-on process
to get started.
Like any other Workspace license,
you can assign voice licenses from the User section.
In this case, I'm adding a license to Priscilla.
You can also do this in bulk for many users at once.
After this, you'll manage your telephony system
from the Voice settings.
So this is where you can do things
like set up your desk phones remotely,
configure your emergency contact locations,
and manage phone numbers in your inventory.
You can also update your user assignments
or bring your existing phone numbers to Voice
through number porting.
Whenever you assign a user number
or let them do this themselves, your corporate directory
will be updated automatically.
Let's say you want to set up a shared main line phone number.
Voice provides two ways to do this--
ring groups and auto attendants.
In this case, let's create an auto attendant.
This gives callers a menu that can respond
to people calling in when none of the team
can answer the phone.
We'll give it a name and then create a simple menu.
All we have to do is type in an intro
and then select the options we want.
In this case, we'll direct existing customers
to support if they press 1.
And if they press 2, we'll send callers
to our shared voicemail.
We can enter a voicemail greeting,
just like we did earlier, and we can
specify who should receive these voicemail messages, as well.
And don't worry, if at some later point all of these people
have left our company or just are
no longer part of the system, Voice
will alert the Admin to a broken configuration.
We'll give this auto attendant a number
so it can be used on its own if we ever want to.
We can also set up a different response when
it's outside of business hours.
And whether the prompt is uploaded or typed,
you can always check what it sounds like, as well.
TEXT-TO-SPEECH: Our office is closed.
Our opening times are 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, Monday to Friday.
Please leave a message and our team will get back to you
as soon as possible.
PATRICK WYNN: And since this is a main line number,
we want those voicemails to go to a group of people.
So we can choose who that group should be and enter
their details in here.
Now what we really want is for our team to answer calls.
We can do this with a ring group.
Let's create one for our main line number.
We'll add our teammates, and instead
of a round robin or simultaneous calling,
we'll set the ring order directly.
And we can tweak the ordering in which the ring group
members will be called.
Now, if no one picks up, we can send the call
to the menu we created earlier.
Let's give this ring group a number.
This will actually be the public facing number for our business.
Let's see what it looks like for a member of this ring group.
Voice will ring with inbound calls in the desktop UI, desk
phones, and mobile devices.
However, people often have Gmail open on their desktop.
[ALERT TONE] I can see right away
that it's a call to the main line number we just created.
After answering it, I can always transfer it to someone else
if need be.
As you can see, members are automatically
emailed to notify them once they've
been added to a ring group.
Now if, for any reason, the team doesn't answer incoming calls--
for example, if they're outside working hours--
calls will just go straight to voicemail,
and those voicemails are automatically
transcribed and then distributed to the members of the ring
group.
Hopefully that gave you a taste of how the product works.
Now, our customers have put Voice
to use in a variety of different areas, so let's touch
on a few of them.
As mentioned earlier, in 2020.
Education took advantage of the rapid rollout
ability of Google Voice to keep their staff connected.
This is important because much of the teacher-parent
communication may not happen through email, but rather
by phone call or text.
And as a dad, I experienced this firsthand
when class details had to change at last minute.
You just get a text message telling you right away.
Voice has provided an official phone number
to lots of staff members with internet access in education.
Most of all, it didn't require teachers or staff
to use their personal numbers, and helped
them control when and how to communicate.
All kinds of organizations have been rolling out Google Voice,
including government.
We put a lot of work into making Voice
easy to use from any device whilst helping customers meet
their compliance or regulatory needs through tools like Vault
and audit logs.
As with any core service in Google Workspace,
Voice is included in our independent audits
and certifications.
In addition to meeting regulatory requirements,
organizations in the public sector
have been turning to Voice as a way
to reduce overall total cost of ownership
and simplify IT management within the already familiar
Google Workspace Admin Console.
And these days, it's important to be as flexible
and extensible, no matter where members of your organization
work.
Voice makes it easy for users to get set up
with their existing devices.
No additional mobile sims are required to do this.
As is the case with the rest of Workspace,
security and seamless integration
are par for the course.
You can also start small and scale up
as needed to help keep costs low.
So hopefully this gave you a quick summary of our updates
to Google Voice.
You can find out more information from
cloud.google.com/voice.
And while we have you here, there
are a few other great Workspace sessions
to deepen your understanding of how Workspace
is enabling hybrid work and new patterns of collaboration.
You can explore our Workspace website and Learning Center
to learn more about specific products
and how you can ready your team and organization
to adopt Workspace.
And lastly, you can stay on top of all the great Workspace news
on the Google Cloud blog, as well as the Workspace Updates
blog.
Thank you.