Using the new Google Voice service is awesome. It’s great if someone still has more than one phone, like a seperate number for their cell phone and home phone numbers. Just using it for voicemail is incredible and it’s freakin’ free.

Google Voice uses your Gmail contacts. If someone in your contacts either individually or in a group calls, you can setup different options as to what happens. Send them straight to voice mail, send your friends and family to your home phone, work contacts to your work phone and you can have a custom voice mail for every group or every contact if you want.

I can set up a voice mail for my contact to say, “Hey Paul, I’m out leave a message and I’ll call you back.” While everyone still gets the boring, “Leave your number at the tone.” message.

It does NOT cut out your mobile minutes. But if you’re on a plan that has unlimited calling to a certain number, you can add your Google Voice number and use Google Voice as your outgoing calls also. Google Voice mails are transcribed (sometimes may not be perfect), sent to your email or you can play on the web, download or forward to someone else. You have the option to record incoming calls and those will be transcribed and kept on the web in your Voice account.

Want to really block a number? Have it blocked and they get a “number has been disconnected” message. Don’t want the phone to ring late at night? Set it up to send all calls straight to voice mail or allow friends through. The best part, you can have this number for the rest of your life if you want, no matter how many times your cell, home and work numbers change.

You can look at, listen even tag your voice mail just like in Gmail. Even tag annoying calls as spam and they go directly to voice mail from now on.

Conference, add an incoming call to your current conversation, incredible call screening that will allow you to pick up, send to voice mail, listen to the voice mail as it happens and even pick up the call during the voice mail.

When you receive your invite, it took mine and my wife’s about a month to get back, you choose your number, either by numbers or letters in any area code. Of course it’s not going to give you a number that’s already taken no matter how bad you want to be able to dial your name by letters or some other combination may be taken. If you really don’t like the number you’ve chosen, you can change it later for $10.

We just changed our phone numbers and let everyone know our new numbers, I may wait awhile and I’ll send out another and change it one last time. It’s hard to believe it’s free, enjoy it while you can, there’s got to be a catch in there somewhere or someday. What ever they charge, it will be worth it.

I wish I had invites to hand out, but they’re not doing it like that for Voice. And 25 free business cards with your Google Voice number FREE.

Check the short videos about the features here – http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html