Google Voice has some great features available including the ability to use a single phone number by ringing multiple phones, call screening, recording, and more, but if you don’t want to switch to a GV number or port over your existing phone number, you can still reap the benefits that GV offers in the area of voicemail.
These benefits include the ability to access your voicemail from the internet, have your voicemails transcribed into text and emailed and/or sms’ed to you, and keep a record of your messages.
This is actually a very simple process.
All you need to do is login to Google Voice and access the Settings in the upper right hand corner. If you have not already added a phone, you can do so here.
Once this is done you will see a link next to your phone saying “activate Google voicemail on this phone.” Click that link and it will tell you to call a specific number from the phone beginning with a “*”.
Just repeat this process for every phone that you would like to use the GV voicemail for. The process to deactivate this is just as simple. You will see a button in the same location with a number to dial to disable this service.