The first thing you’ll notice about the updated Google Voice apps is a cleaner, more intuitive design that keeps everything organized. Your inbox now has separate tabs for text messages, calls and voicemails. Conversations stay in one continuous thread, so you can easily see all your messages from each of your contacts in one place. We’ve upgraded the messaging experience with support for group and photo MMS as well as in-notification replies. And we’re starting to introduce voicemail transcription for Spanish and will improve accuracy over time.
On one hand, Google making updates to Google Voice shows me that it’s not on the chopping block for retirement or integration into another application with features I don’t want such as forcing me to use Gmail just so I can use Google Voice.
On the other hand, there was nothing wrong with Google Voice’s UI before. It was simpler, much faster and cleaner. Just loading the page takes 10 seconds now versus 1 before. Too many Javascript and UI elements are being called and that’s with Ghostery and AdBlock installed.