Google Inc’s new service, Google Voice, weaves traditional phone features with Google's Gmail product, therefore allowing a person to store transcripts of voicemail phone messages in their email inbox and to find a specific nugget of information within a phone message as if trawling through a sea of emails.

The service is an outgrowth of Grand Central, which Google acquired in 2007, and then shut down to new users as it prepared to adapt to the Google universe. In other words, just sign in to voice.google.com, pick up a new phone number in your local area code, and assign your various phone numbers to it. Now, when you get voice mail calls on your various phones, the messages are transcribed for free. They instantly show up in your Gmail e-mail box.

"This is about allowing your existing phone to work better. It's not that we are replacing your phone, we are giving [it] the ability to work better," said Craig Walker, now group product manager for real time communications at Google and co-founder of GrandCentral.

However, the most significant part of Google Voice, at least according to Charles Golvin, principal analyst at Forrester Research, is that it will allow users to meld all of their different forms of communication - email, voicemail and SMS - into one. That's a useful for uber-connected people who want to communicate seamlessly across many different accounts.

Google claims its service is the only fully automated voice-mail transcription service on the market. The transcriptions may include mistakes, and Google will make accuracy improvements over time, the company said. 

Last week Skype began transcribing its customers' voice mail messages into SMS (Short Message Service) text messages using technology from U.K. Company Spinvox. If the Spinvox software is unsure about a word, it plays that part of the recording to a person who confirms or corrects the transcription. So there’s less human intervention involved, unlike this new Google service.