New in Google Voice: Receive and Reply to SMS by Email

Starting today, Google Voice users can route around yet another feature their cell phone carriers would like them to pay for: text messages. Google Voice now allows users to receive and reply to text messages by email without incurring any charges from their cell phone carriers. By default, Google Voice still forwards SMS messages to the cell phone a user has on record with Google Voice. Now, however, this new feature allows users to simply to forward these text messages to any email address. Responding to these messages is as easy as replying to the email.

Google Voice gives users a new phone number that can then ring any other phone, as well as free voicemail transcriptions, SMS messaging, and cheap international calls. It is important to remember that Google Voice is not a full VoIP service like Skype, however. While the Google Voice backend relies on VoIP technology, however, users can’t completely route around their land line or mobile phone providers as Google actually calls a user’s home phone or cell phone number to initiate a call. At least to receive and reply to SMS messages, however, users now don’t really need their carriers anymore.

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