Slydial is a free new phone services that lets you dial directly to voicemail and lets callers avoid sometimes awkward talks. slydial lets you connect directly with another person’s cell phone voice mail, bypassing the traditional ringing process that often results – sometimes disastrously – with someone picking up on the other end.

Users call (267) 759-3425 from either a cell phone or a land line, and are prompted to enter another person’s cell phone number. After playing a short advertisement – unless users pay a subscription fee or 15 cents per call to skip ads – Slydial puts callers directly into their target’s voice mail. Recipients should then get a voice mail notification, and sometimes they will see a caller’s number show up as a missed call, too.

The company rolled out a private test phase of Slydial in March, and has added about 5,000 users since. The service opened to the general public in a beta testing phase a week ago.

The ability to call straight into someone’s voice mail is not new. Most major cell phone carriers offer subscribers the option of sending voice messages to other people, but usually only to customers of the same wireless company. What’s different here is that Slydial makes it possible to do it with any major wireless carrier’s customer.

There are constraints to this service. It can only be used in the United States right now, and generally won’t work with prepaid cell phones. Also, sly dialers must have the caller ID feature activated on their phones, which Macomber said is meant, in part, to prevent people from using it to harass people undetected.

Indeed, Nora Rubinoff, 45, who runs an administrative support company, At Your Service Cincinnati Ltd., has found Slydial helpful both for business and personal situations. She has left reminder messages for people one of her clients intends to interview. And when her husband travels to a different time zone for work, she can leave him a Slydial message without disturbing him at an odd time of day, she said. “It’s been really handy,” she said.

Gavin Macomber, co-founder of MobileSphere Ltd., the Boston communications company behind Slydial, thinks it can be useful not only in the dating scene, but also in the hectic business world.  He said,”Everybody has gone through the scenario where they’ve called somebody and just hoped they got voice mail so they didn’t have to have a conversation.   The idea for Slydial came up while MobileSphere developed the voice mail routing component of a service meant to lower the cost of international roaming on cell phones”.