Dialpad vs Google Voice

2020. Dialpad raises $100M Series E at a $1.2B valuation



Dialpad, the business-centric voice, video and contact-center service, has raised a $100 million Series E funding. The company says its valuation is over $1.2 billion after it has now raised a total of $245 million. The funding news comes only a few weeks after the company also announced its acquisition of video conferencing service Highfive, a move that brought deeper expertise in mobile video and conferencing room devices to the company. Recently, Dialpad has put a lot of emphasis on its AI solutions. Back in 2018, it launched its VoiceAI service, for example, and it now offers a number of AI solutions as part of its Voice Intelligence service (or Vi, as the company calls it). This includes a note-taking service, for example, as well as call transcripts and sentiment analysis, among other features.


2020. Dialpad acquires video conferencing service Highfive



VoIP provider Dialpad, the company behind the popular video conferencing service UberConference, today announced that it has acquired Highfive, a well-funded video conferencing startup that focuses on providing businesses with conference room solutions. Dialpad is clearly aiming to double down on video. While UberConference does have built-in video conferencing features already, the service is mostly known for its calling features. In addition to its conference call solutions and VoiP platform for business users, Dialpad also offers a contact center solution.


2018. Google Voice version for enterprise came to G Suite



Google is starting to roll out an enterprise version of its Google Voice service for G Suite users. Google voice has been a long-enjoyed service for everyday consumers, and offers a lot of benefits beyond just having a normal phone number. The enterprise version of Google Voice appears to give companies a way to offer those kinds of tools, including AI-powered parts of it like voicemail transcription, that employees may be already using and potentially skirting the guidelines of a company. Administrators can provision and port phone numbers, get detailed reports and set up call routing functionality. They can also deploy phone numbers to departments or employees, giving them a sort of universal number that isn’t tied to a device — and making it easier to get in touch with someone where necessary. There’s also a spam filtering feature, which will probably be useful in handling waves of robo-calls for various purposes.


2018. Dialpad acquired AI-startup TalkIQ



Dialpad, the business communications platform, has acquired TalkIQ to take an injection of artificial intelligence. TalkIQ can capture voice in near real time and apply sentiment analysis and analytics. This could provide a customer service operation with feedback in real time along with advice for managers when to intervene in a call. The TalkIQ functionality will be incorporated natively right into the Dialpad suite of apps, which includes voice and video along with customer service call center management and UberConference for conference calling.


2017. Google Voice gets group chat and other new features



Google has launched a refreshed version of its VoIP calling service Google Voice on mobile and the web. Largely, the update is about giving the product a more modern look-and-feel, after having not received a major upgrade in years. But the relaunch also includes a few new features, like support for photo-sharing, group conversations, Spanish-language voicemail transcription, and more. In the new app, the Google Voice inbox has separate tabs for your text messages, calls and voicemail, explains Google in its blog post about the update. Your conversations will now stay in one continuous thread, which makes it easier to keep up with the messages from your contacts in a single place.


2011. Google adds phone conferencing to Hangouts



What was the Skype's killer feature that made it super-popular? Video calling. And on what Skype is making money? On IP-telephony. Google wasn't able to repeat the same trick with GTalk/GMail/Google Voice. Because people got used to Skype already. But maybe Google will succeed with the rapidly growing group video chat Google Hangouts. That's what Google is going to do - integrate Hangouts with IP-telephony. The new tool in Google Hangouts already allows to call landlines and mobile phones and connect people that are not currently by a computer to the online meeting. This is especially important for business meetings when you need to connect client or partner to your meeting. However, meanwhile these external calls work only in the United States and Canada (and work for free). But it's no doubt that soon it will become available in other countries via paid Google Voice calls.


2011. GMail VoIP is available almost globally


VoIP-service in GMail, which was earlier available only in the U.S. and Canada, has appeared in the user accounts in almost all countries of the world - in 38 languages. Here is the list of countries where Gmail Call Phone is NOT currently available: Argentina, China, Cuba, Egypt, Ghana, India, Iran , Jordan, Kenya, Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Nigeria, North Korea, Peru, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Viet Nam. With this global intervention, Google has lowered its VoIP rates, making them slightly cheaper than rates of its new main rival - Skype. For example, a call to France costs 8 cents (vs. 16.9 cents in Skype), to USA - 1 (vs. 1.9). As before GMail Call Phone requires quick browser plug-in installation - the same plug-in that is used for video calling in GMail.


2010. Google added 60 more services to Google Apps

As promised, Google has added the consumer services (that were previously only available for individual users) to the Google Apps suite. Last week they added Google Voice (for US and Canada users only) and today - allowed to add any of 60 Google services. Account administrator can select which services to add and which - not. Moreover, the administrator can define which users or groups will have access to each service. For example, for marketing staff he can add Adwords (for advertising), Google Analytics (for monitoring site stats), Blogger and YouTube (for corporate blog and video blog), and for IT professionals - Google App Engine (for developing business applications). Also potentially useful for business may be Google Reader (as an enterprise RSS reader) and Picasa (for intranet galleries). The opportunity to add new services is also available in the free version of Google Apps.


2010. GMail = Unified Communications client



Few days ago the analytical company Frost & Sullivan stated that Google will soon storm the unified communications market, which is dominated by Cisco, Avaya and Microsoft. After all, Google has GMail, Google Voice, GTalk, Buzz, Gizmo5, Android, GISP and it remains just to combine all these technologies into single offering. And Google has decided to immediately confirm this forecast - from today GMail allows you to make and receive phone calls (thanks to the integration with Google Voice and Gizmo5). Meanwhile the VoIP service in GMail is available only in US. ***


2010. Google Voice hacked iPhone by means of HTML5



The story of Google Voice ban on the iPhone is over. Thanks to Apple and AT&T, Google Voice app hasn't arrived to iPhone yet. That's why Google went the other way and launched the web service, that works in the mobile Safari browser just like the native application. It allows you to make calls via the Web interface, view and listen to the voice mail, send and receive text messages. But the most interesting thing in this story is that the emergence of this application may cause a revolution in the current mobile marketplace. Earlier we wrote about the political games around the HTML5 implementation. And one of the major players in these political games is Apple, the manufacturer of the most popular mobile device, iPhone, which is known for its closeness. No application can get to iPhone unless it's approved by Apple. ***