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Last month Google reserved an additional 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, who has been providing numbers for Google Voice since it was announced. Many are speculating it’s release to the world in general is eminent. A public launch has been anticipated since Google said in March the service would be “open to new users soon.” Many believed the new numbers would be unleashed on June 18th, but Google Voice Product Manager Craig Walker quickly dispelled that on his own Twitter stream.

Google Voice is the re-branded GrandCentral. Google Voice provides a lot of the functionality of a full blown PBX and wraps it all into a user friendly interface. Many believe it will provide “One Number To Rule Them All” where you have a single number that rings any or all of your phone. You can also decided which calls go to which numbers, screen incoming calls, use SMS, and have your voicemails transcribed and sent to you (though this isn’t 100% perfect it works pretty darn well). The full list of features can be found on the Google Voice “About” page.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Google would add number portability later this year to Google Voice, which would let users keep one of their existing phone numbers as their Google Voice number. For example, users could make their cell phone number their Google Voice number.

I don’t know that 1 million numbers is enough to satisfy the demand for users wanting to get their hands on Google Voice, especially once number portability is integrated. I know people who check almost daily in an attempt to get a Google Voice account (lucky for me I’ve had an account since it was known as Grand Central). What we may be seeing is Google ramping up for the first round of public beta’s. Perhaps they will do like GMail and let the first 1 million number out, and then only additional numbers via invites from existing users. We’ll see soon enough as Google seems to be adding more and more features and gearing up for some type of release in the near future.

Google acquired Grand Central in July 2007… then it kinda died. If you were lucky enough to get a number the service continued to work but it appeared as if the Big G just forgot about the service. It now appears though that GrandCentral will rise from the ashes as Google Voice. It will offer a suite of telephony services, including all of the existing GrandCentral features as well as an automated voicemail transcription service, the ability to send and receive text messages, and integration with your Gmail contacts. Users can now also call any number in the the U.S. for free!

The catch: Currently it’s only available for GrandCentral users—who, according to the Google Blog post, should be receiving instructions in the next few days.

The new interface will look a lot like Gmail, with your inbox, SMS messages, access to voicemail and other features in a sidebar on the left. You can make calls directly from the Google Voice web interface. After you initiate the call, the service will actually first call your mobile phone or landline, and after that your call will be placed over Google’s network. Voice calls within the US will be free (watch your back Skype), you can purchase credits for international calls, and it will also offer free conference calls.

So GrandCentral will be replaced with Google Phone, and it looks to be a killer. Apparently, Google was not just sitting on GrandCentral and letting it die. It will integrate the One-Number-To-Rule-Them-All service, Voice Over IP (VOIP), SMS messaging, unified voicemail, voicemail transcriptions, AND a mobile version. This thing is going to be killer… check out the videos below.

Google Phone Voicemail transcripts:

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GrandCentral is an awesome idea. GrandCentral doesn’t replace your phones; we just link them together and help them do more. How do we do that? We give people One Number…for Life^TM – a number that’s not tied to a phone or a location – but tied to you. With GrandCentral, you can be reached with a single number, answer a call at any phone you want, seamlessly switch phones in the middle of a call, and even know whether a call is important before you take it.

I’ve been a beta user for a while now and the service is pretty slick. Unfortunately, the number assigned to me got all kinds of random calls so I’ve stopped using it for the short term.

So what does GrandCentral let you do?

BOIOIOING! Gmail can now send text message chats to mobile phones using the built-in Chat feature. Right now it’s only available via the “GMail Labs”. To turn it on, go to the Labs tab within Gmail’s settings. If you don’t see the option right away, check back later (it wasn’t there for me yet) — Gmail product manager Keith Coleman, who demonstrated the new feature for Webmonkey, says it will be made available in Labs to all Gmail users Thursday evening.

Once the option is turned on, start typing a phone number into Chat’s search box and you’ll see the option to send an SMS.

If you already have your friend’s phone number stored in your Google account’s contacts, try searching for them by name. When your friend’s name appears in the drop-down list of contacts, you’ll see an option to send them an SMS. You can also hover over or click on anyone in your Chat buddy list to send them an SMS.

The first time you send a text message, it will appear on the person’s phone as coming from a number in the 406 area code. Google has made several thousands of these numbers available for Gmail users, and once a number is associated with your account, all of the text messages you send through Gmail will come from that number.

The 406 number works both ways, so your friend can reply to you via text message. Also, your friend can save that number in their phone as belonging to you, and they can even use it to initiate new chats with you.

via WebMonkey