GrandCentral Transforms Into Google Voice

Thursday March 12, 2009

I'm one of the lucky few people who has a GrandCentral account. This is a service Google acquired nearly two years ago that lets you use a single phone number and have it forward your calls to any or all of your phones. GrandCentral can also act as an answering machine, filter out annoying callers, and more. Shortly after they bought the service, they froze new accounts while they built the new service on Google's servers.

Looks like the day is finally here, and everyone will get to enjoy GrandCentral under the new name: Google Voice. Google will first convert existing GrandCentral accounts over to Google Voice, and then they'll open the service up to new accounts. That's expected to happen within a few weeks.

Google Voice will be a free service, just like GrandCentral. It will also add some new features to the existing feature set, including SMS forwarding, voice mail transcripts, and conference calling. I can't wait to see if they can finally forward calls to numbers with extensions.

Update: Nope. They still can't forward to extensions.