Google Voice has always been a great service (even if no one outside of America has had the chance to use it yet), but it’s been held back by a couple of shortcomings. One of the biggest shortcomings was its inability to facilitate SMS through other apps.

Whereas Google Voice enjoyed seamless integration with the core operating system for making and receiving calls, SMS required you to use the Google Voice app (and MMS is still a bit of a mess). If you’re a CyanogenMod user, that is no longer the case. The team has merged its “Babel” code into the project as “Voice Plus,” and with that, we get the ability to send SMS messages through Google Voice accounts using virtually any SMS app we choose.

This feature should be showing up in the latest nightlies as of July 22nd. Those of you who prefer stable and milestone builds will have to wait, but we imagine it won’t take long before we get a major revision to add this (and other features) to the ROM. If you’re feeling a bit adventurous and are willing to put up with a few bugs to try out the latest features, head to Get.CM and find the nightlies for your device.

[via Google+]