Google Offers Google Voice Beta Invites to Any College Student

Attention all college students, professors, and school employees:

Google would like to offer you the Google Voice Beta.  It doesn’t even look like there’s a time limit on this, but if graduation is coming up for you you might want to jump on it: you need an e-mail address that ends in .edu.  The service also only works in America.

The reasons behind this, according to the Google Voice Blog:

We’ve found that Google Voice can be useful in many different ways to many different people. But one group of people that it’s especially well-suited for is students… But since Google Voice is currently only available by invite, a lot of students are still listening to voicemail and sending text messages the old-fashioned way…. So starting today, we’ll be giving priority Google Voice invites to students.

Google Voice is a sort of alternate phone solution, done in the Google style.  Which is to say, there are a lot of features, some more useful than others, and it may take some time for you to figure out how to make the service “sing,” so to speak.  As for those features, they include voicemail transcriptions sent to your email, a new phone number that can redirect callers to any of your phones based perhaps on time of day or who is calling, and caller blocking.

As I remember, you didn’t even get a phone in my college’s dorm rooms unless you requested one, and even then, the method of navigating to your dorm room voicemail was f-ing byzantine, and this is coming from someone who was, at the time, plowing through Myst games like candy.  The service probably also would have come in handy in my Sophomore year, when I couldn’t make long distance calls from my dorm phone (without a prepaid card) and couldn’t get reception on my cellphone from within my dorm room.

Anyway, we’re (mostly) not college students anymore, so let us know how it goes.

(via Techmeme.)