Google Voice About to Launch?

There's a lot of rumors that Google Voice is about to launch. Well, some rumors may not be based on that much substance.

The latest round is based on a report that Google has reserved one million phone numbers from Level 3, a company that has been supplying the phone numbers for Google Voice. This may indicate Google is ready to open up their service to more users soon.

Google Voice is a VoIP service that allows you to give everyone a single phone number and have calls forwarded to multiple phones. The service also takes voice messages and attempts to create a text transcript of voice messages. Google purchased GrandCentral and relaunched the service as Google Voice in March. Google Voice is still in a closed preview, but you can sign up to be notified when new numbers become available. Most Google Voice users, including me, were previously GrandCentral users.

There are probably massive technical hurdles to conquer on many fronts, but the biggest usability hurdle I've faced is for phone numbers with extensions. At this point there's no way to forward your call to a number with an extension, which leaves out the daytime numbers for countless office workers. The feature has been listed on their feature request forms since at least 2007.

• Review of GrandCentral
• Google Voice First Thoughts