You have got one or two phone numbers at work, your home phone number, your cell number and perhaps a couple more numbers. They all do the same job, only with different phones. What you need is a universal or a single phone number that that can ring any or all of your phones. If you are in the USA soon you will be able to get one, thanks to Google. Google has begun rolling out Google Voice, a service to let you manage your phone life through a single, Internet-connected or VOIP phone number. You will not pay anything to Google although you will pay for your regular phone numbers.

Check out voice.google.com to sign up for a free account. At the moment it is by invitation and a few thousand new users are being added at a time. Remember Gmail when it was launched five years ago; today Gmail is used by millions of people. Google Voice could be as a popular as Gmail in a few years from now.

In fact Google did not start the concept - In 2007, Google bought over GrandCentral, a start up that issued phone numbers. The GrandCentral phone number did not belong to any particular phone or phone company; it belonged to you, for life. GrandCentral was founded in 2005 by Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet and was purchased by Google in July 2007 for US$95 million. GrandCentral was re-launched as Google Voice in March 2009 with new features. After it bought GrandCentral Google gave the impression that it had given up on launching or improving on it. But the fact remains that Google was working on GrandCentral project in secret for the past 3-4 years and it is now rebranded as Google Voice. Google Voice is retaining many of the features of GrandCentral and has added an impressive array of new features. After its announcement in March 2009 it started transitioning its GrandCentral customers to Google Voice and last month it opened up by giving out invites to others.

Google will make money from selling advertising on various websites. It merely needs you to keep going back to those sites with features and services that could be indispensable such as a master control system for all your phone numbers.

I expect Google Voice to be a big hit with millions of accounts getting added in the next few years. Google Voice could revolutionize telephones. Good luck to Google in its endeavors on making it a success.

Will Google ever roll out this unique and useful service to other countries, for example India?

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