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" Q:  Between my work and personal lives, I juggle no fewer than four different phone numbers. Is there a simple way of making it easier to handle all these phones? A:  With today&amp;#039;s mishmash of landlines, office phones and personal and company-issued cellphones, people who aren&amp;#039;t forced to juggle multiple phones (and multiple phone numbers) have become an endangered species. Google Voice is undoubtedly the best way to manage this mess.  Chances are good you&amp;#039;ve heard of Google Voice\u2014the service started in 2005 under the name GrandCentral before Google bought it in 2007 and relaunched it last March as Google Voice\u2014but it&amp;#039;s amazing how many people ask me just what it is and what it does. Fact is, this is such a complex and feature-filled service that it really isn&amp;#039;t easy to explain in a single statement. The easiest approach is to think of it as call forwarding on steroids\u2014a service that takes all incoming calls and automatically routes them to the proper phone (or phones), depending on who&amp;#039;s calling.  This lets you cut the numbers you give out down to a single set of digits (a new number that&amp;#039;s given to you for free by Google) that you can distribute to anybody. Your boss is calling? Google Voice can forward the call to your work phone. A client? Have the call go straight to your cellphone. Your mother? All your phones can ring, simultaneously. Awesome? Definitely. I&amp;#039;ve been using the service since it first launched, and it&amp;#039;s now the only phone number of mine that most people know. The best part: Like virtually every other Google service, it&amp;#039;s free\u2014although, as of press time, the service was still invite-only, so you&amp;#039;ll need to find somebody else with an account who can give you an invitation. The Google Voice magic doesn&amp;#039;t end there. Even people who have no interest in consolidating calls to a single number can probably find something useful in Google Voice. For example, Google Voice revives an old answering machine mainstay that we sometimes miss: the ability to listen in as somebody leaves a voicemail and pick up halfway through the message. It even allows you to transfer a conversation from one phone to another, midcall, as long as both numbers are linked to the same Google Voice account. Even better is the way Google Voice treats voicemail. The iPhone&amp;#039;s Visual Voicemail feature has drawn acclaim for allowing users to instantly pull up and play whichever voicemail they want. Google Voice takes it a step further\u2014not only does it let you play individual messages on demand (either on your phone or through the Web), but it actually transcribes your voicemails and gives you the option of receiving the transcription as an e-mail. (You might say it takes the voice out of voicemail.) For now, the automatic transcription service is very, very far from perfect (it&amp;#039;s prone to pretty hilarious mistakes), but it usually gets enough words right that I&amp;#039;m able to get the gist of a message at a glance. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/a5561/how-google-voice-works-digital-clinic/>