Google Voice is a telephone service that provides a U.S. phone number to Google Account customers[1] in the U.S. and Google Workspace (G Suite by October 2020[2]) customers in Canada, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.[3] It is used for call forwarding and voicemail services, voice and text messaging, as well as U.S. and international. Calls are forwarded to the phone number that each user must configure in the account web portal. Users can answer and receive calls on any of the phones configured[4] to ring in the web portal. While answering a call, the user can switch between the configured phones. Subscribers in the United States can make outgoing calls to domestic and international destinations. The service is configured and maintained by users in a web-based application, similar in style to Google's email service Gmail, or Android and iOS applications on smartphones or tablets.
Google Voice currently provides free PC-to-phone calling within the United States and Canada, and PC-to-PC voice and video calling worldwide between users of the Google+ Hangouts browser plugin (available for Windows, Intel-based Mac OS X, and Linux).[5] Almost all domestic and outbound calls to the United States (including Alaska and Hawaii) and Canada[6][7][8] are currently free from the U.S. and Canada, and $0.01 per minute from everywhere else.[9] International calls are billed according to a schedule posted on the Google Voice website.[10]
Many other Google Voice services—such as voicemail, free text messaging, call history, call screening, blocking of unwanted calls, and voice transcription to text of voicemail messages—are also available to U.S. residents.[11] Voicemails, missed call notifications, and/or text messages can optionally be forwarded to an email account of the user's choice. Additionally, text messages can be sent and received via the familiar email or IM interface by reading and writing text messages in numbers in Google Talk respectively (PC-to-Phone texting).
