At least two people have received invitations to Google's upcoming service, Google Fiber Phone, according to the Washington Post. The service appears to be tightly coupled with Google Fiber internet, and seems like it will supersede - or at least follow on from - Google's fairly well known Google Voice service.
The service shares many similarities with Google Voice, including providing things like voicemail, device unification and call transcription. It also provides an automatic call-screening service which will filter certain calls based on the time of the day.
Invites have been going out for at least a month now, but only for those who are apart of Google's inner-ring of testers for upcoming Google Fiber features which they call Google Fiber Trusted Tester program.
This isn't the first time Google has dabbled in providing a phone service: excluding Google Voice, last year they launched Google Fi which has them competing with wireless cellular phone service providers like Sprint and T-Mobile. These latest revelations make sense when this is considered, as it would be the last area of communications that Google hadn't yet penetrated or at least expressed interest in getting involved in.
What happens next is anyone's guess: if the service is successful then it will be rolled out with a wider and more accessible offering, but if it's unsuccessful, then it might end up in the scrapyard.
Source: WaPo
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