Ribbit injects voice into Google Wave release

Ribbit, one of the earliest web-based telephone services (acquired last year by British telecom giant BT), plans to ride Google Wave’s coattails — announcing the integration of several gadgets allowing voice calls, phone conferencing, text messaging and voicemail transcription into the search engine’s new, much-hyped communication platform.
These services, available in the limited beta release going live tomorrow, are meant to introduce voice as a major pillar of net communications, along with email, social networks and instant messaging. Google’s Wave ties all of these modes (and groups of people) together into a single interface. Ribbit has capitalized on this format, letting you easily select which members of your Wave you want to include on a call. In a document that opens up on the right-hand side of the screen, you can add Ribbit’s conference call gadget: A list of everyone invited to the call with icons allowing you to call them with one click and showing their connection status. You can also add text above and below this gadget providing context for the call. Everyone invited to this particular call can view the edits in real time. Once this is set up, the call leader can click one button to call all participants at once. The gadget shows everyone’s phones ringing and then picking up as it happens. These calls can be routed to land lines, mobile phones, your browser, or even other VoIP services like Skype.

For the time being, conference invitees need to provide their own phone numbers, though the company says it is working to integrate people’s contacts and address books to supply these numbers automatically. It is also developing call recording and playback capabilities — even to the extent that it will indicate who on a call said what.
Similar Ribbit gadgets allow users to send text messages to phone numbers directly from their Waves. They can also receive text messages from phones, which will be included in their regular Wave stream along with messages, emails, photo galleries and any other data being sent between the groups of people included on their Waves. Voicemails left via Ribbit can be transcribed and included in Waves as well. As Ribbit’s development team points out, this feature could prove especially helpful for customer service organizations taking voicemails and email messages from clients looking for help. With all of these textual messages recorded in the Wave, anyone from within the customer service department could easily address complaints or questions.
Ribbit hopes to use several of Wave’s built-in features to enhance these offerings even more. For example, it says that the Wave includes little programs called “robots” that could theoretically pick words like “urgent” or “emergency” out of transcribed voicemails or calls — they could then send relevant users text messages or emails to alert them to critical information.
With both the Wave’s and Ribbit’s APIs flexible and open for developers, expect to see a lot more accessory applications like these coming out of the woodwork. And while other VoIP companies may pitch similar capabilities, Ribbit seems to be the early frontrunner — operating with Google’s blessing (it was hand-selected by the search giant for the preliminary beta release) and the backing of BT.
Here’s a demo of Ribbit’s gadgets included on the Google Wave site:

You can view the video demos for other Google Wave extensions here.