(Cross posted from the Gmail blog)

When we launched calling in Gmail back in August, we wanted it to be easy and affordable, so we made calls to the U.S. and Canada free for the rest of 2010.

Since we launched Google Voice for iPhone a few weeks ago, we’ve been hard at work to add a few improvements that didn’t make it into the first release.

At the top of the list was adding support for iPod Touch and iPad.

With two grown children, my mom decided that one perk of empty nesting (in addition to a lack of teenage angst and a lot less laundry) was canceling our complicated family cell phone plan. When she signed up for a new plan, she also mistakenly signed up for a new phone number.

Growing up, December was always a favorite month of mine. School would let out for two weeks, snowflakes would start falling and I’d write my letter to Santa to remind him that I’d been especially good that year (and ask if he’d mind bringing me a few Ninja Turtles).

Keeping in touch with family during the holiday season can be challenging for anyone, but it’s especially difficult for military families with loved ones serving around the country or overseas.

Gmail’s built in video chat and free calls to the U.S.

Google Apps recently launched an improvement that made dozens of exciting Google services available to Google Apps users for the first time. As part of this launch, Google Voice is now available to our Google Apps users for free with their Apps accounts.

Earlier this year we launched a Google Voice HTML5 web app for iPhone users. Today we’re taking the Google Voice experience on the iPhone to a whole new level with the launch of the official Google Voice for iPhone app.

One of the great parts of working on the Google Voice team is that we get to hear about all the interesting, productive, and fun ways you take advantage of Google Voice.

Heading off to college usually means packing up the car and saying goodbye to your family and friends, so the Google Voice team put together a bunch of ways to make it cheaper and easier to stay in touch while you’re on campus.

Mobile is all about getting super fast access to what you’re looking for and Google Voice is no exception. So, today we’re releasing an update to the Android app, which gives you immediate access to your Google Voice Inbox and settings via two new home screen widgets.

Google Voice lets you take charge of your telephony experience, giving you one number that rings all your phones.

Last week, we launched Google Voice in Gmail to let you make calls right from your computer.

Google Voice lets you manage all your phone communications and seamlessly make and receive calls on any of your existing phones.

Update (5:05PM, August 9): This has now been rolled out completely.

Update (4:06PM, July 23): This new feature is not yet active for 100% of calls placed with Google Voice. We plan to roll this out for all calls in the next week or so.

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At Google we are obsessed with speed.

If you’ve called your Google number to listen to your voicemail over the last couple days, you may have noticed that things sounded a bit different. The new voice that’s greeting you is Kiki Baessell, a fellow Googler with a friendly voice who helped us record new automatic voice messages.

A little over a year ago, we released an early preview of Google Voice, our web-based platform for managing your communications. We introduced one number to ring all your phones, voicemail that works like email, free calls and text messages to the U.S.

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.

Google Voice makes it easier for people to reach you by only having to call one number that rings all your phones. But sometimes you don’t want to be reached -- like if you’re in a meeting or watching a movie.

Ah, remember the days when you’d be in the middle of leaving a voicemail and suddenly hear an unexpected beep to indicate you had run out of time for that message? Or when you’d return from vacation only to find your voicemail box was full and friends weren’t able to get through to leave messages fo

Using Google Voice for Android just got a whole lot faster. Until now, notifications of new messages appeared within 15 minutes of when they were sent.

It's hard to believe, but it's a year to the day since we first launched Google Voice!

One of the best things about this past year has been receiving tons of helpful feedback and ideas from our users.

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.

Until now, sending a text message to multiple recipients required copying and pasting the message for each recipient.

To make this a bit easier, we just launched the ability to send a single SMS message to multiple recipients.

Today we are launching a new Google Voice mobile web app for iPhone OS 3.0 and higher and Palm Web OS devices, harnessing the power of HTML5, a new web technology that makes it possible to run faster, richer web-based applications right in the browser.

With today's official release of Google Chrome extensions comes a new & improved Google Voice extension that gives you easier access to many Google Voice features:

- See how many new messages you have.

When it comes to voicemail, Google Voice is all about saving you time.

It's impossible to watch the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake without wondering how one can contribute in helping the thousands of families who lost everything in this disaster.

We're excited to see today's launch of Nexus One, particularly since Google Voice is one of the pre-installed apps on the phone. This is the latest version of the Google Voice mobile app we released for Blackberry and Android-powered phones last July.

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