GoKawiilEdgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR Google Voice has added two new personal plan options.
Voice Starter offers access to support and extra features for $10 a month.
Voice Standard adds Gemini tools to what you get with Starter for $20 a month.
Google Voice is easily one of the company’s most overlooked services. Updates are few and far between, it desperately needs to be modernized with RCS support, and it’s long felt like Google could be about to kill it off at any moment. Today we’ve got some good, if not potentially a little controversial news about Voice, as Google overhauls its offerings with two new personal paid Voice plans.
So far, we’ve basically had two main tiers for Voice: free access for personal accounts, letting you conveniently connect all your devices to the same phone number, and paid Workspace access for businesses and institutions looking for a robust multi-user solution. When we do see a new Voice feature arrive, like the Gemini-powered note taking we learned about last month, it tends to be restricted to that paid Workspace side of things.
That’s changing with the introduction of Voice Starter and Voice Standard plans. The tier we’re familiar with will be known as Voice Basic, and will continue to be free to use. For $10 a month, users can upgrade to Voice Starter, which adds access to customer support, features like three-way calling, and promises not to reclaim your Google Voice number if you leave the service inactive for too long.
Above that, Voice Standard goes for $20 a month (discounted to $10 for your first six months), can intelligently route your calls with “auto attendants,” and adds in that Gemini note taking we just saw introduced.
Google serious snuck these new plans in under everyone’s radar. We’re noticing them today after 9to5Google pointed a spotlight on them, but looking through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, it appears that Google first introduced them back in the first week of June. While we still haven’t seen Google make any big formal announcement of the new plans, a Voice support page helpfully breaks down exactly which features are available across the paid and free offerings.
The idea of paying for Google Voice will probably always feel wrong to some users — especially to those who have been using it (or precursor GrandCentral) for the better part of two decades now without paying a dime. And while Google may struggle to convert everyone over to these new paid tiers, just seeing their arrival feels like very good news for the service’s future. This is easily the clearest sign we’ve had in a while that even personal Voice accounts remain a priority for Google, and we’re breathing a little easier as a result.
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