Google on Friday began giving students priority access to its Google Voice service, which has remained in a closed beta since its transition from GrandCentral in March of last year.

Typically, invites for the service can take anywhere from a few hours to several months to arrive after a user signs up. But the company is now promising those who have an e-mail address that ends with .edu access to the service within 24 hours. Google had done something similar for active members of the U.S. military back in August.

In a blog post on the new initiative, Google said that the company had received a large amount of feedback from college students who had wanted to use the service for its free SMS and voice mail transcription services.

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