Google Hoping To Bring Voice Integration To Other Carriers

A quick refresher if you're not familiar with Google Voice: it allows you to choose a US phone number to serve as your central number. Any calls to that number can be filtered and forwarded to any of your phones accordingly. Other features like voicemail transcription and SMS forwarding are the cherries on top. Apps are available for iOS and Android, although carrier integration is the dream many are chasing. Google has hinted that that it's trying to court the various carriers.

While Google didn't want to go into specifics, it did tell CNet in an interview that they were "having discussions with other carriers" about Google Voice integration. That would allow customers to take their existing carrier numbers and convert them to Google Voice, rather than having to choose an entirely new number when signing up for the service.

Google went on to say that people who use the Voice use it as their primary cell number. That gives customers the flexibility to filter out unwanted numbers, or hand out a single number if they juggle multiple phones.

While carrier integration is great, proper support on Android devices would be ideal. The Galaxy Nexus was updated a few days ago to support Google Voice voicemail integration in the standard dialer. Normally on Android devices you would have to do that through the standard Google Voice app.

[via CNet]