Google turns voicemail to email with new product

* Google Voice transcribes voicemails to text

* Messages can be forwarded as an email or SMS text

* Offers consumers single phone number to route calls

* Free service aimed at consumers

* First major upgrade of 2-year-old Google acquisition

By Alexei Oreskovic

SAN FRANCISCO, March 11 (Reuters) - Google Inc (GOOG.O) is
seeking to blur the line between the telephone and the computer
even further with the introduction of Google Voice on Thursday.

The new service weaves traditional phone features with
Google's Gmail email product, allowing a person to store
transcripts of voicemail phone messages in their email inbox and
to find a specific nugget of information within a phone message
as if trawling through a sea of emails.

The move comes as Google increasingly branches out from its
stronghold in Internet search, as it seeks to carve out a role
in everything from cellphones to personal productivity
software.

And it demonstrates the company's ability to fuse various
technologies -- home-grown and acquired -- into new products,
even as the economic recession puts the future of certain Google
projects in question.

Google Voice is based on the technology of Grand Central
Communications, a company that Google acquired in July 2007.
After Grand Central remained silent for nearly two years under
the Google flag, some observers wondered whether it had met the
same fate as Dodgeball, a Google acquisition that was formally
shut down this year.

Google Voice represents the first major update to Grand
Central since the acquisition. Like the original Grand Central
product, Google Voice offers consumers a single phone number
that can route incoming calls to home, office and cell phones.

The new version uses speech-recognition technology that
Google developed for its Goog-411 telephone directory service,
automatically transcribing voicemails into text. The transcribed
messages can be forwarded as an email or SMS text message to a
person's email inbox.

It is unclear how Google Voice will fit into Google's
business model, which relies on advertisers to provide 97
percent of the company's revenue. The company has also ventured
into the mobile software market, launching last year the Android
mobile operating system.

Other than a feature that bills Google Voice users when they
make long-distance phone calls, the product has no immediate
means of generating revenue, said Craig Walker, group product
manager for Real Time Communications at Google.

He said that Google Voice, which will be available to
existing Grand Central users on Thursday and to the general
public in the following weeks, provides another reason for
people to spend more time on Google's various online properties,
which benefits the company.

Google also makes money from selling enterprise versions of
its applications to corporations. But Walker said the current
priority is to make Google Voice a success as a free consumer
product.

"There's all sorts of things we can do down the road,"
Walker said. "But right now we're just totally focused on
getting the consumer product out."
(Reporting by Alexei Oreskovic, editing by Matthew Lewis)