Google posted an offer to college students a few days ago, saying that they would receive Google Voice invitations within 24 hours. All you need is a .edu email address.

Google Voice is best thought of as a lightweight operator for your own personal telephone exchange. Once you’ve set it up and created a new phone number, you can basically tell the system to direct calls to your various phone numbers (home, work, cell) depending on when they are placed and who they are from. And once you have the dialing party on whichever line you had specified, you can still access multiple controls, such as recording the call or switching to a different line.

The voicemail transcription isn’t that great right now, and it could integrate better into the cell phone experience (it might be more straightforward on some Android phones), but overall many people think it is useful asset for managing a lot of their communications. And now that Google has made it so easy for students to try,
there’s just one big downside to switching over.

Once you do, it’s hard to switch back. To get the full functionality out of the system, you have to switch phone numbers to a new one provided by Google for free– Google touts it as “one number for life.” But if you ever decided that Google Voice isn’t working out for you, the process of telling everyone who had your new number that it is no longer the correct one can be time consuming and frustrating.

Do you use Google Voice? How? Or if not, did Google’s offer convince you to try it?