Want a Google Voice invite? Get yourself an .edu email address

Google Voice is a pretty awesome service that lets you give out one phone number that you can use to ring your home, mobile, work, and other phones. If you miss a call, Google Voice will not only take a message, but it will transcribe it (poorly), email it to you, and archive it in your account so you can search for messages later — just like you would with Gmail messages. And you can adjust your settings so that your phone will only ring from 9 to 5, or whatever other hours you choose.

There’s just one catch. Google Voice is invite-only at the moment while Google continues to beta test the service.

But today Google announced that it’s giving priority to students interested in signing up for Google Voice accounts. I imagine students make good beta testers… but they also tend to use their phones. A lot. For sending text messages, making calls, and everything else. So if you want to really test the system, what better way to do that than to invite students?

Anyway, the long and short of it is that if you’re looking for a Google Invoice invite, your chances just got a lot better if you happen to have an email address ending with .edu. Just visit the Google Voice Students web site and enter your address and Google promises it will send out an invite within 24 hours.

Oh yeah, Google Voice is still only available to US residents.