Google Wave does voice too via APIs

Google’s big challenge with its new Wave application is helping users understand exactly what it is: Is it email, instant messaging, a wiki or some new, mutant combination of all of the above?

Whatever it is, it’s also got voice messaging and conferencing capabilities as well, thanks to Google Wave’s built-in APIs and integration with Ribbit’s voice application platform.

Those capabilities find Google yet again stretching its legs squarely on to telco turf, joining Google Voice, Google Talk and assorted other services, apps and add-ons that show the search giant experimenting with voice, conferencing, SMS and other telecom services.

Google sent out more than 100,000 invitations to begin using Google Wave beginning today. That’s a typical Google process, similar to how it slowly launched its Gmail email service and Google Voice offering as well. In a second blog post on its Wave developer site, Google described how Wave’s APIs enable the addition of so-called “gadgets” and “robots” that can be used to add functionality to the platform. In addition to Ribbit’s voice add-ons, mainstream companies like SAP and Salesforce.com have built Google Wave demos and other developers have integrated video, mapping and other capabilities into it as well.

At its heart, Google Wave is a collaboration tool that combines real-time communications with the ability to store and link to specific parts of that conversation as data objects. The basic platform includes contact list, email-like and instant-messaging-style modules. Ribbit used the platforms APIs to add in voice capabilities not as something separate but integrated right into the Google Wave collaboration flow, said Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs.
“What they have is a platform and a container for data objects that represent things that people are interacting with,” Griggs said. “What Ribbit has done is turned the voice element of collaboration into a data object. That’s a powerful thing.”

Specifically, Ribbit built extensions for the Google Wave platform using a mash-up of its own recently-built REST APIs and the Google Wave APIs. It used those links to build Ribbit Conference, which enables real-time audio collaboration between participants in a wave, or conversation. With a click or two within the Google Wave application, users can create an audio connection between multiple parties and mute, hold or disconnect any individual participants from the stream. Ribbit also showed an early version of a Message Gadget that will let Wave participants leave each other voice messages within the application, even when offline. The messages can be consumed within a wave as an audio attachment or be transcribed in written form.

Ribbit’s voice application platform is designed to let developers integrate voice capabilities into any application or business process. It has shown a reference implementation of a Web calling application and also built a service that integrates voice calling and messaging into CRM service Salesforce.com.

All of these services – not to mention Google’s own Google Voice service – ultimately represent the consolidation of typically real-time services like voice and SMS and non real-time services like email and stored documents onto a single, integrated platform. The real power comes in blurring the lines between the two worlds, for instance, making voice a stored data object in a messaging stream or making document collaboration more real-time, said Kevin Marks, Ribbit’s vice president of Web services.

“These two things have been heading together for some time, moving together from opposite directions,” he said. “Ribbit is sitting in the middle, as a bridge between the already real-time world of telephony and the almost real-time world of the computer. This modality is important because a conversation today is likely not just a single phone call or text message or email but a number of these things that are all part of the same conversation.”