Google Voice is awesome

In case you haven’t heard, Google Voice is now open to the public. You should go sign up. I guarantee there’s something here that you can take advantage of.

To start off, Google gives you a new phone number which seamlessly integrates with your existing one. Callers who use the GV number are blindly forwarded to your real phone number(or any combination of several real numbers, depending how you set it up.)

Maybe your boss has a bad habit of calling you when you’re off the clock – no problem… route any of those 5pm or later calls from him straight back to your office number!

To cut down on mobile minutes, you may want to talk to your friends on your home phone when you aren’t on the go. You can schedule Google Voice to forward to that line during the hours when you know you’ll be home. Your friends won’t know the difference except that they dialed your Google Voice number to contact you.

You also get SMS service. Using the Google Voice Android app(or their web app for other , more.. ahem.. “tightly controlled experience” phones) you can send limitless texts without blowing through your plan’s quota. Heck, with the Google Voice Chrome extension, you can text back and forth from your web browser. How great is that?

FInally(but not really.. there’s a ton of other features that I’m not going to get to).. you get a great voicemail service. When callers leave you a voicemail(and you can use this service with your existing cell #), you can view the message on the web, as if it was an email. Google uses their excellent voice translation technology to deliver near-perfect transcriptions of any messages you receive. These messages can also be emailed to you if you wish. As mentioned before, I opted for the Google Voice Android App, which expectedly pops up a status bar notification when new VM or SMS messages arrive.

If you’re interested at all, I highly recommend giving it a shot. There’s a ton of ways to make Google Voice do exactly what you want and I haven’t covered even a fraction of them.