Google Voice Transforms Your Phones–with a new uni-number & free calls!

Imagine–one unified number for all your phones and a program which turns your voice mails into text! Almost like having your phones read your mind!

and from any phone if you dial your google voice number calls in the US are FREE! Calls to international locations are practically free. What happens to Skype and others like it? Google Voice has a mouth and will be gobbling up its competitors.

And what about Google knowing all our business? (What’s different?)

Google Voice grew out of Grand Central which Google gobbled a few years ago and has regurgitated it as Google Voice. According to David Pogue in today’s New York Times, Grand Central could do some amazing and powerful tasks:

But wait, there was more. Each time you answered a call, while the caller was still hearing “one ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies,” you heard a recording offering four ways to handle the call: “Press 1 to accept, 2 to send to voice mail, 3 to listen in on voice mail, or 4 to accept and record the call.” If you pressed 3, the call went directly to voice mail, but you could listen in. If you felt that the caller deserved your immediate attention, you could press * to pick up and join the call. This subtle feature saved time, conserved cellular minutes and, in certain cases, avoided a great deal of interpersonal conflict.

GrandCentral also lets you record a different voice mail greeting for each person in your address book: “Hey, dollface, leave me a sweet nothing” for your love interest, “Hi, boss, I’m out making us both some money” for your employer.

You could also specify which phones would ring when certain people called. (For the really annoying people in your life, you could even tell GrandCentral to answer with the classic, three-tone “The number you have dialed is no longer in service” message.)

Also very cool: Any time during a call, you could press the * key to make all of your phones ring again, so that you could pick up on a different phone in midcall. If you were heading out the door, you could switch a landline call to your cellphone.

In a few weeks, one more aspect of our life as we know will radically change. Or at least we’ll have the opportunity and the choice to opt in to having our phones all ring at once no matter which number was dialed. Maybe this means for me it’s finally time to change from yahoo to gmail–and to macmail too!