I'm happy to say that all the phones in my life now use google voice. The gist of GV is that google gives you a number which can route to your cell, home, or office. Depending on who calls, you can have google ring any or all of your phones. Alternatively, if you don't really want to talk to the person, you can have it go straight to voice mail. Think spam filter for the telephone. There are lots of other little bonuses including:
- Free domestic calling
- Cheap international calling
- Machine voicemail transcription that is sent to your email (not super accurate but usually good enough)
- Do not disturb mode
- Free text messages
- GV widgets for website like the one at the bottom of this page (I have it set to go to voicemail)
The list goes on and it seems like they keep adding features. As a science hack we are setting it up to receive calls in the lab so that the person responsible for checking messages can do so very quickly on their computer and we can block unwanted calls. Right now the service is invitation only and I have a couple of invites to give out, so anyone who's interested can shoot me an email and I'll hook you up. If you want more info, check out this link and video:
Chris Pepper at Macworld.com also wrote a good article on this. Click here to check it out.