I’m pretty sure that this has been covered elsewhere.   In fact I decided to do this from reading a post somewhere, so I know its been covered elsewhere,  but now I can’t find it.  Since I’ve seen a few folks asking about how to use Google Voice, I figured I’d document how I use it here.  Basically, I prefer to get text messages and/or emails of my voice mail to my cell phone, so I can read messages without having to call a number and press a whole range of keys to hear everything correctly, write down a number, etc.   Here’s what I do.

1. First, you need to have a Google Voice account.  If you don’t, I think Google is gradually dolling them out at google.com/voice
2. You should setup your Google Voice account so it recognizes your cell phone, or whatever phone you are using for this.
3. Then you will need to use the codes at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_forwarding to setup your phone to forward missed and busy calls to your Google Voice number.
4. You use the codes by dialing the following, for example, from your cell phone *61* 1234567890# where 1234567890 is your Google Voice number.   This would set up your cell phone to forward missed calls to your google voice number.
5. You may want to consider doing the same thing by using the right *code from the wikipedia page above to also send busy calls to Google Voice.  Note that I’m not sure these codes work for everyone.  It may depend where you are and who your cell carrier is.
6. Then set Google Voice to use “Do Not Disturb” as this basically sends all calls to your google voice number right to email.  Do this by clicking on “Settings” and then checking “Do Not Disturb” and then “Save Changes”
7. Be sure you have also selected “Transcribe Voice Mails”
8. In the “Notifications” settings for google voice, you can enable transcripts of messages to be sent to an email address, a mobile phone via SMS, or both.

And that’s it.  Be sure to record your  Google Voice voice mail as that’s what people will hear, not your voice mail that you probably setup earlier for your cell phone.

It works great for me.  So if you have read this far, I hope you found this helpful.