The Google Voice team also developed a free App (ie, application) to run on the Apple iPhone. You can also reply to them, either with a call or another text, and your SMS exchanges appear online as a conversation, just as with email. You can file them, search them and, for the first time in the history of mobile telephony, keep them. Google Voice collects messages in your web inbox just like email. To the original service, Google Voice adds a number of intriguing facilities: free voicemail transcription so that your messages can be delivered as text free - and easy - conference calling international calls at rates even lower than Skype's, and much lower than those charged by your mobile network (of which more later) and, finally, sophisticated text message organisation. It looked as though GrandCentral had vanished.īut last March it turned out that under the surface Google's programmers were transforming GrandCentral into Google Voice ( bit.ly/HTWBR), which is basically the original idea on steroids. It stopped accepting new customers, and existing subscribers continued to receive the service they had signed up for, but apparently little else - no customer support, for example. Then, in July 2007, it was bought by Google for $95m and effectively disappeared.
The service was a modest success, but nothing to write home about.
Walker and Paquet founded a company called GrandCentral. All voicemail messages would be funnelled to a single voicemail box on the web - and you could have free text messaging as well. They thought, what if you only had one number and could redirect calls to any of your phones and change the redirects in an instant? No longer would people have to track you down by dialling multiple numbers wherever you were, your unique number would find you. Got some feedback? You can share it with me here.I n 2005, two chaps in California, Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet, noticed that people increasingly had several telephone numbers (home, work, mobile).
And note that if you don't have an internet connection, or if for some reason the voice audio download isn't working for you, you can also use a recording app that records your devices "internal" or "system" sound. Note: If you have offline-compatible voices installed on your device (check your system Text-To-Speech settings), then this web app works offline! Find the "add to homescreen" or "install" button in your browser to add a shortcut to this app in your home screen. You can also adjust the pitch of the voice to make it sound younger/older, and you can even adjust the rate/speed of the generated speech, so you can create a fast-talking high-pitched chipmunk voice if you want to.
You could use this website as a free voice over generator for narrating your videos in cases where don't want to use your real voice. You're free to use the generated voices for any purpose - no attribution needed. As mentioned above, the downloaded audio uses external voices which may be different to your device's local ones.
If you don't know how to install more voices, and you can't find a tutorial online, you can try downloading the audio with the download button instead. Many operating systems (including some versions of Android, for example) only come with one voice by default, and the others need to be downloaded in your device's settings. Note: If the list of available text-to-speech voices is small, or all the voices sound the same, then you may need to install text-to-speech voices on your device. You can even use it to reverse the generated audio, randomly distort the speed of the voice throughout the audio, add a scary ghost effect, or add an "anonymous hacker" effect to it. For example, you can make the voice sound more robotic, or like a giant ogre, or an evil demon. Want more voices? You can download the generated audio and then use voicechanger.io to add effects to the voice. If you don't like the externally-downloaded voice, you can use a recording app on your device to record the "system" or "internal" sound while you're playing the generated voice audio. You can download the audio as a file, but note that the downloaded voices may be different to your browser's voices because they are downloaded from an external text-to-speech server. This web app allows you to generate voice audio from text - no login needed, and it's completely free! It uses your browser's built-in voice synthesis technology, and so the voices will differ depending on the browser that you're using.