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Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications, through dozens of features — ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email. While we’ve heard from users that they love our growing list of features, we’re conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming to people trying it for the first time. So we’ve created a short video that gives an overview of what Google Voice can do.

In addition, we’ve created a set of short videos that dive into more detail about ten features of Google Voice:

1. Voicemail transcription
2. One number
3. Personalized greetings
4. International calling
5. SMS to email
6. Share voicemails
7. Block callers
8. Screen callers
9. Mobile app
10. Conference calls

The videos show why you might want to use each feature and basic instructions for getting started. And each video focuses on just one topic so you can learn about the features that matter to you.

Finally, we just launched our own YouTube channel at youtube.com/googlevoice. You can view all of the videos mentioned above in a custom video gadget we built for this channel, which will help you keep track of which videos you’ve already watched.

Want in on Google Voice’s web-based, transcribed, custom-greeted voicemail, but you’re not quite ready to adopt a new number? Starting tonight, Voice users can choose to keep their number and still get Google’s upgraded voicemail features. (Note that this still requires a Google Voice invite as GV is still in beta).

Google Voice is a Swiss Army knife of cool and free phone service add-ons — including free SMSes, an online mailbox for voice messages, the ability to have one number ring all of your phone numbers simultaneously, low international rates and a customized voicemail messages for every contact. It’s not phone service per se though, since you still need a mobile phone or landline.

But using Google Voice requires users to use their Google Voice number as their main number. That’s a not-inconsiderable burden, given that some mobile phone users have thousands of contacts who know their number and don’t want the hassle of changing business cards and forcing others to update their contacts.

Google’s solution? Create a light version that gives phone-number-huggers better voicemail. Using a mobile carrier’s call-forwarding codes, Google Voice Light will send a mobile phone’s unanswered calls to a Google-powered mailbox. When callers leave a message there, Google records and transcribes it, and saves it in an online mailbox. The roughly translated text and a link to an online recording can be sent via SMS or e-mail.

The capability will also benefit those who have migrated to Google Voice, since currently the voicemail feature only kicks in when people call the Google Voice number, which forwards the call to a user’s mobile phone. Currently, those who call the mobile phone directly leave a message using the mobile carrier’s network, but with the new system, those calls can be diverted as well.

The voice messages can be stored in perpetuity, forwarded to family or friends, and they can be saved, even if you decide to switch mobile carriers. In return, Google gets your loyalty, more users with Google accounts and more pages for it to place online ads. That’s also not including the training data it gets for its translation engine — not dissimilar to why Google offers a free phone number lookup: GOOG-411.

This doesn’t really help me since my carrier charges for forwarded calls… bummer.

Last month Google reserved an additional 1 million phone numbers with Level 3, who has been providing numbers for Google Voice since it was announced. Many are speculating it’s release to the world in general is eminent. A public launch has been anticipated since Google said in March the service would be “open to new users soon.” Many believed the new numbers would be unleashed on June 18th, but Google Voice Product Manager Craig Walker quickly dispelled that on his own Twitter stream.

Google Voice is the re-branded GrandCentral. Google Voice provides a lot of the functionality of a full blown PBX and wraps it all into a user friendly interface. Many believe it will provide “One Number To Rule Them All” where you have a single number that rings any or all of your phone. You can also decided which calls go to which numbers, screen incoming calls, use SMS, and have your voicemails transcribed and sent to you (though this isn’t 100% perfect it works pretty darn well). The full list of features can be found on the Google Voice “About” page.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that Google would add number portability later this year to Google Voice, which would let users keep one of their existing phone numbers as their Google Voice number. For example, users could make their cell phone number their Google Voice number.

I don’t know that 1 million numbers is enough to satisfy the demand for users wanting to get their hands on Google Voice, especially once number portability is integrated. I know people who check almost daily in an attempt to get a Google Voice account (lucky for me I’ve had an account since it was known as Grand Central). What we may be seeing is Google ramping up for the first round of public beta’s. Perhaps they will do like GMail and let the first 1 million number out, and then only additional numbers via invites from existing users. We’ll see soon enough as Google seems to be adding more and more features and gearing up for some type of release in the near future.

Google acquired Grand Central in July 2007… then it kinda died. If you were lucky enough to get a number the service continued to work but it appeared as if the Big G just forgot about the service. It now appears though that GrandCentral will rise from the ashes as Google Voice. It will offer a suite of telephony services, including all of the existing GrandCentral features as well as an automated voicemail transcription service, the ability to send and receive text messages, and integration with your Gmail contacts. Users can now also call any number in the the U.S. for free!

The catch: Currently it’s only available for GrandCentral users—who, according to the Google Blog post, should be receiving instructions in the next few days.

The new interface will look a lot like Gmail, with your inbox, SMS messages, access to voicemail and other features in a sidebar on the left. You can make calls directly from the Google Voice web interface. After you initiate the call, the service will actually first call your mobile phone or landline, and after that your call will be placed over Google’s network. Voice calls within the US will be free (watch your back Skype), you can purchase credits for international calls, and it will also offer free conference calls.

So GrandCentral will be replaced with Google Phone, and it looks to be a killer. Apparently, Google was not just sitting on GrandCentral and letting it die. It will integrate the One-Number-To-Rule-Them-All service, Voice Over IP (VOIP), SMS messaging, unified voicemail, voicemail transcriptions, AND a mobile version. This thing is going to be killer… check out the videos below.

Google Phone Voicemail transcripts:

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