Google preparing to steer more telephone traffic

— -- Get ready for Google Voice: The Web search giant is entering the Internet phone market with a sophisticated product aimed at tying together all of your cellphone voicemail, landline messages and e-mail boxes.

Google Voice is a new program, coming soon, that assigns you a new central phone number to monitor all your various messages.

Sign in to voice.google.com, pick up a new phone number in your local area code, and assign your various phone numbers to it. Now, when you get voice mail calls on your various phones, the messages are transcribed for free. They instantly show up in your Gmail e-mail box.

In our tests of the service this week, the e-mail transcription happened within seconds.

Unlike Gmail, there are no ads. Google hopes to make money on Voice by selling low-cost international calls.

You dial in to your Google Voice number, get a dialtone, and then make the international call.

The service is an outgrowth of Grand Central, which Google acquired in 2007, and then shut down to new users as it prepared to adapt to the Google universe.

Now, Grand Central — renamed Google Voice — is open only to the 100,000 or so existing Grand Central users. Voice will open to the public "in the coming weeks," but Google senior product manager Vincent Paquet wouldn't be more specific.

"Google gives you ways to manage your e-mail and photographs, and we think there¹s a need to manage your voicemails," said Paquet. "We want to get all your messaging in one place." With Google Voice, your voicemails are now digital, so, Paquet says they can now be posted on blogs, and shared in e-mails.