Today, Google officially announced that they were relaunching Grand Central, a website and service that they purchased over a year ago, as Google Voice. If you don't already have a Grand Central account, you'll have to wait as they are only opening up this service to Grand Central account holders to start, and even then, you may have to wait for instructions for converting your account (as we currently are). The service gives you one phone number which can be connected to all your separate phone numbers—your cell phone, your office phone, your home phone—with special rules for when calling your Google Voice number should ring which number, and even which calls should go directly to voicemail. The voicemail is all web-based and gets emailed to your email account and Google Voice will even transcribe the voicemail for you (so it sounds like it might be a good on-the-go note taking procedure to call yourself and leave a message). Google Voice can also handle SMS messages.

All in all, it looks like a valuable service and best of all it's free. The only large unanswered question is will this service be a priority for Google or just another project that they launch in Beta and don't do much with. Time will tell, and once we get access to the service we'll put together some sort of review to let you know how well it works. In the meantime, Google has posted a full list of features of the new service and an introductory video embedded below. 

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