Hangouts now with complete Google Voice integration
This is one of those Google phased rollouts, so if you don’t have it yet hopefully it’ll be there soon. The short of the announcement is Android Central is reporting that Google Hangouts now has complete (or at least near complete) Google Voice integration.
This means you should be able to send and receive text messages and listen to voicemail via the hangouts app on your computer or your phone.
Unfortunately this being a phased rollout, I’m probably at the far end of the queue so I’m unable to test it, but the one drawback seemed to be something that Google Voice (and Hangouts) has suffered with since inception, that being that MMS doesn’t appear to be supported on the computer side, just the phone side.
It’s unclear what the future of google.com/voice will be – while Hangouts does most of the job now, many people use this site for changing Voicemail greetings and phone forwarding (I do this with the Locale GV Settings Plugin and Tasker). The ability to change phone forwarding is the only way I get most of my calls at my house during rush hour (tower’s useless), and as such it’s become something that’s a requirement for me.
According to the AC piece, the update is server side meaning there’s no new app for you to download. Rebooting your phone, going to Google Play, shaking your phone at a dead cat, none of these will speed up this getting to you, although it may seem to.
Hopefully Google won’t break the functionality of what actually allows me to get phone calls on Sprint’s South Nashville network.
I’ll be playing heavily with this whenever it rolls out to my phone and will report my findings, but if any of you have it and notice anything feel free to drop us a line.
[Android Central]
