"The new Google Voice" made its debut in January last year, giving us a glimpse at the company"s renewed focus on its voice-calling service. Continuing on that premise, at its Cloud Next event in July, Google announced that Voice would become a part of G Suite, at the same time showing us an upcoming redesign for the app on both Android and iOS.
The redesign is now live for iOS users. The new icon - and the app"s accents itself - now follow the same color scheme as Hangouts Chat and Meet, effectively demonstrating that Google now offers enterprise users text, voice, and video-based communication under similar branding (going solely by color schemes, at least).
For G Suite users, the default tab is now "Calls", showing users their history along with a dialer button down below. The second tab - also a brand new one - is allocated for all of one"s contacts, with the third one dedicated to messages, with voicemail relegated to a fourth and final one. The app itself adheres to Google"s new "Material Theme" paradigm, with stark whites just about everywhere, sprinkled with the company"s proprietary Google Sans typeface.
The app also touts integration with Google"s new Digital Wellbeing feature, which uses machine learning, along with the company"s knowledge of its users" basic data to bolster the experience of using Google Voice. For instance, calls made by users in different timezones to yours at late night would go straight to voicemail, rather than alert you directly. All of this is limited to enterprise users, however.
Regular users will continue to see "Messages" as their default tab, with the second, third and fourth tabs named "Calls", "Voicemail" and "Keypad" respectively.
You can download Google Voice 18.33 for iOS here if you don"t use it already.For personal users, the service is available only in the U.S.; if you do already use it, you should see the update for it show up in the App Store. There appears to be an ongoing rollout for Android users too, per reports on Twitter, but nothing more than just that as of yet, unfortunately.