14 DAY TRIAL // Surprising no one, Google has announced that Google+ Circles are now a part of Google Voice, the single phone number service. This should make it easier to get in contact with your friends, from Google+ at least, and to manage your various contacts, again, as long as they're merged into Google+.
Interestingly enough, Google is also enabling users to customize Google Voice based on the circles, calls from a certain group can be treated differently to calls from another.
"To help make it even easier for you to organize your contacts, today we’re adding Google+ Circles to Google Voice," the company announced.
"Circles give you more control over how you manage your callers; for example, calls from your 'Creepers' circle can be sent straight to Voicemail, only your 'College Buddies' circle will hear you rap your voicemail greeting, or you can set your 'Family' circle to only ring your mobile phone," Google's Tom Ford, a software engineer explained.
"You can customize your Circles settings by visiting the Groups & Circles tab in your Google Voice settings," he added.
The personalization options are very interesting and it's what makes Google+ Circles in Voice actually make sense. You can have your work colleagues only be able to contact you on your work phone. You can also set different ring tones as well as greetings for each circle.
Google has been building Google+ into all of its products. While the usefulness of that is debatable, the Circles metaphor translates greatly for contact management, even if it's linked to Google+.
Circles are already part of Gmail and are even built into Google Chat so it was only a matter of time before they were built into Google Voice as well. Already, calls from Gmail rely on circles, since the chat contacts list is used.