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A comment on Google Pay. Parent comment

Re:Google Pay by nine_k on Monday January 08, 2018 @04:31PM (#16100791)
Hmm, what? I think e.g. Talk/Hangouts and Voice are radically different: one is about text messaging and video calls, another is about a connection to the "legacy" voice telephony network, with a dial-able number, etc. They started (long ago) form very different areas.

They could have a seamless bridge between them, though. They sort of tried: you can dial a phone from Hangouts, but not back, or you can receive your Voice text messages in the email, but not send a reply back (afaict).

Google is notoriously bad at cohesive product management. They have a number of bright ideas, but no visionary in the consumer product space, so apparently no coordination.

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Re:Google Pay by niftich on Monday January 08, 2018 @04:40PM (#16100870)
Google Voice was a rebrand of a product acquired in 2009. Google Talk was an XMPP chat service launched in 2005, and integrated into Gmail in 2006. "+Hangouts" was originally a feature inside Google Plus, launched in 2011, just like "+Messenger". 'Google Hangouts' was a 2013 launch to bring Talk, +Messenger, and +Hangouts into one product. This was further blurred by their various apps, which sometimes had differing functionality from the websites.

The latest iteration of Google Voice has chat, for example, while SMS support inside the Hangouts Android App was removed on purpose and users told to use yet another app, first called Messenger, now called Messages.

All their communication products suffer from convergent evolution, yet remain in dizzyingly varying states of integration with each other.

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Re:Google Pay by jyrkesh on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @01:13AM (#16104001)
I've had a miserable love-hate relationship with Google Voice for years, what do you mean by "the latest iteration of Google Voice has chat?"
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Re:Google Pay by niftich on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @01:17AM (#16104017)
Announced in January 2017, the Android, iOS, and Web versions of Google Voice have a revamped UI and, apparently, text chat [1]; discussed on HN at [2].

[1] https://blog.google/products/google-voice/ringing-2017-updat... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13463940

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Re:Google Pay by jetpacktuxedo on Tuesday January 09, 2018 @12:48PM (#16108062)
>you can dial a phone from Hangouts, but not back

I use google voice and hangouts. I can both send and receive voice calls using my google voice number via hangouts. I can also send and receive sms message using my google voice number via hangouts. Both of these have been true for at least 4 years, maybe 5. They started trying to phase sms out of hangouts a few years back, but never removed it for google voice users.

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