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Is Google Voice as good as I hear?

Can anyone give me a basic run down on the Google Voice interface. I have not been invited and am extremly curious if it is everything I have heard.A basic description would be great. Thanks in advance.

Whether it's "good" or not all depends on what you want from it.
GV gives you a new number, which can be in any area code, whether you live there or not. Changes to this number cost $10 later, but the first is free.
You have flexibility with GV to add your landline or even other cell phones to the account so that any or all receive the call when it comes in. You can set up a friend's landline as a temporary number, for example, if you have no cell signal at his place.
GV gives you voicemail with custom greetings for various contacts. I much prefer YouMail for this, but to each his own. In addition, you can set certain callers to go straight to voicemail or which phone rings when they dial your GV number.
GV allows you to screen calls *while* they're being recorded to voicemail. You can choose to "pick up" at any point.
You can also record calls in progress.
GV gives cheaper rates for international calls.
If you tell a bunch of people to call you at a certain time, you can add them to a conference call on the fly.
I'm sure there's something I've missed. It's a pretty flexible service. It allows your number to be tied to *you* rather than to any particular device or carrier.
Voicemails can be transcribed and sent as text in an e-mail.

http://www.google.com/googlevoice/about.html

I absolutely love it. I don't get reception in my office, so I use GV to route any calls to my cell during work hours to my desk phone and work cell. I use the GV number for situations where I don't want sales people calling my home or real cell and if I'm giving my number to someone I will most likely never see again

SMS free of charge was what brought me in - and the latest update to the app brings real-time syncing (previously the lowest possible refresh setting was 5 minutes). I already pay ATT for a data plan, why the hell should I have to pay an extra $15 for what amounts to a miniscule amount of data? Google Voice solved that problem.
I moved myself entirely over to GV, no one calls my actual cell number. I haven't had any significant issues so far, and I've been using it for half a year.

I only use it for the voicemail, which is more than enough reason to use it. You use your same phone number but get digital transcribed + audio voicemails with a very clean interface, also available on the web. You can set up sms and email notifications too.

The one drawback I can think of is this:
If you use GV completely, unless you have one of the unlimited plans from t-mobile (or your GV number set up under the old MyFaves plan) it uses minutes like any other call. No mobile-to-mobile anymore. Anybody care to back me up or refute this?

beartard said:
The one drawback I can think of is this:
If you use GV completely, unless you have one of the unlimited plans from t-mobile (or your GV number set up under the old MyFaves plan) it uses minutes like any other call. No mobile-to-mobile anymore. Anybody care to back me up or refute this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Really? Damn no wonder they got rid of MyFaves. They realized this and made a fix by removing it completely maybe. hahaha.
Have to admit I am payng ALOT 95/month for unlimited everything while my girlfriend pays only 50/month for the same thing with Boost.
The only thing with Boost is that the phones are trash.

beartard said:
Whether it's "good" or not all depends on what you want from it.
GV gives you a new number, which can be in any area code, whether you live there or not. Changes to this number cost $10 later, but the first is free.
You have flexibility with GV to add your landline or even other cell phones to the account so that any or all receive the call when it comes in. You can set up a friend's landline as a temporary number, for example, if you have no cell signal at his place.
GV gives you voicemail with custom greetings for various contacts. I much prefer YouMail for this, but to each his own. In addition, you can set certain callers to go straight to voicemail or which phone rings when they dial your GV number.
GV allows you to screen calls *while* they're being recorded to voicemail. You can choose to "pick up" at any point.
You can also record calls in progress.
GV gives cheaper rates for international calls.
If you tell a bunch of people to call you at a certain time, you can add them to a conference call on the fly.
I'm sure there's something I've missed. It's a pretty flexible service. It allows your number to be tied to *you* rather than to any particular device or carrier.
Voicemails can be transcribed and sent as text in an e-mail.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can you confirm that if you receive a phonecall out of state but receive or make a call through your Google Voice # it is still considered local??

I've had it for a while, but only just started using it on my phone, although my wife uses it to call back to england (nothing cheaper).
To get around it using minutes just figure out what local access number it is dialing, and add that to your fave fives (I'm on the original day one g1 contract still, so I still have fave fives)
For me the sms and vm management are the best things about it, but it's also nice to know I won't ever have to port a number over if I switch carriers

legend221 said:
Can you confirm that if you receive a phonecall out of state but receive or make a call through your Google Voice # it is still considered local??
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Click to collapse
I'm not sure I understand the question. I live in Florida and have a GV number in Atlanta. Calls from Atlantans to my GV number are considered local for them.
And about MyFaves, I believe GV was the main reason tmo got rid of the plan. If you use GV for everything and have your GV number as one of your fave five, you'd use zero minutes from your bucket as far as tmo is concerned.

beartard said:
The one drawback I can think of is this:
If you use GV completely, unless you have one of the unlimited plans from t-mobile (or your GV number set up under the old MyFaves plan) it uses minutes like any other call. No mobile-to-mobile anymore. Anybody care to back me up or refute this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mobile-to-mobile still applies for incoming calls (at least on ATT). I would imagine Tmobile (or any carrier) would work the same way.

beartard said:
I'm not sure I understand the question. I live in Florida and have a GV number in Atlanta. Calls from Atlantans to my GV number are considered local for them.
And about MyFaves, I believe GV was the main reason tmo got rid of the plan. If you use GV for everything and have your GV number as one of your fave five, you'd use zero minutes from your bucket as far as tmo is concerned.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Got it, you answered my question even though it wasn't well put. Thanks for confirming!
Damn!! I got suckered into the "Loyalty Plan" now everyone and anyone can use the plan. I should of stuck with my MyFaves plan, worst mistake of my life taking this service off.

According to an APP i downloaded called GV dialer. apparently it will route your call through internet and not use your minutes when you dial.
now i dunno if thats true, but im testing it at the moment. but it makes my own google voice call me and then it calls the person i'd like to call.
and btw i love google voice ^^ great if you need a business number.

Bzerk1 said:
According to an APP i downloaded called GV dialer. apparently it will route your call through internet and not use your minutes when you dial.
now i dunno if thats true, but im testing it at the moment. but it makes my own google voice call me and then it calls the person i'd like to call.
and btw i love google voice ^^ great if you need a business number.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I tried GV dialer on my old mytouch with no sim, it didn't go through, said i wasn't registered on a network. =( So i'm guessing it doesn't use wifi. Not sure about 3g/edge on network.

Bzerk1 said:
According to an APP i downloaded called GV dialer. apparently it will route your call through internet and not use your minutes when you dial.
now i dunno if thats true, but im testing it at the moment. but it makes my own google voice call me and then it calls the person i'd like to call.
and btw i love google voice ^^ great if you need a business number.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The only difference when calling between GVDialer and the official GV app is that GVDialer will count as an incoming call and Google's GV app will count as an outgoing call. So if you have free incoming it would be benificial to use GVDialer to make your phone calls.

Been using it for quite some time now.. mainly for the SMS feature.. too bad I can't send SMS to European numbers tried to SMS the in-laws using GV but no go..

I am now using GV as my work voicemail. Took a while to get our stubborn carrier to set up the No Answer/Busy forwarding, and I had to set my work number in GV as "mobile" to enable the forwarding options. The end result is that when I don't pick up my work number, the callers get forwarded to my GV voicemail.
The only drawback is that in Google Voice the greeting can only be set based on caller ID, so you can assign it to contacts and groups. This means that you cannot set a greeting based on which one of your numbers was called, i.e. you can't set a separate "work" greeting and assign it to your work number.

That reminds me...one thing I despise about GV is the inability to *upload* custom greetings. Their system of recording-from-the-handset-while-calling-in really blows.
That's why I prefer YouMail for voicemail. Its standard greeting greets your callers by name (if you have them in your contact list saved on YouMail's site).

heh, I was just looking for a way to upload greetings yesterday and found this out...
very disappointed, I was going to give each of my contacts their own private greeting - which would have really screwed with a couple of my friends

force connect to another network?

Situation: The place I go skydiving at is really rural. My service goes in and out, but is more out than in. Is there any way possible to force a connection to the AT&T network that's out there? When I try, I get the message "Your SIM card does not allow this" or whatever it says. I don't wanna drop my T Mobile service, as I've had them since '02 and they've been great to me. But I'm at wit's end with this no service thing every weekend when I jump =/
Thanks in advance
~Lania

lol.... no not unless you can somehow get ATT to allow T-Mo sims.... and hell has a better chance of freezing over..... only option i can think of is grab an ATT ppd sim.... either do the hack to install 2 sims (requires pretty severe physical modification to the phone) or simply remove your T-mo Sim and insert your ATT sim....
you ARE using google voice arent you? in that case you can have all incoming calls ring both numbers, seeing as you should only have one registered on a network at a time....
welcome to the only reason i ever even think of dropping my T-Mo service.... and ive had them since before they were called T-Mobile... (powertel, i think.....)

No, I don't use Google voice. Don't you have to have an invite for that?
Anyway, it's not that big a deal I guess...My service has been gettin a lil better the more I go out there. Last weekend if I put my butt up against the hanger door, I got signal lol My contract is up next August. Prob switch to Verizon then unless T Mobile gets somethin done with the quickness about their service coverage.

you can have an invite sent to you by someone who has it, or you can request an invite off the google voice page it's self, it just takes about a week to get the invite if you request thru GV site... id HIGHLY reccomend getting one, all kinds of cool stuff can be done, including (but not limited too) Cheap international rates (.02 per min to landlines almost anywhere), totally unlimited calling over SIP (this ones pretty tricky to setup), visual and transcribed voice mails, caller screening, call routing (inbound).
if WiFi is available where your having signal issues then a SIP solution through GV, a SIP provider, SIPSorcery, and PBXes.org could give you access to phone calls (inbound and outbound, to/from you GV number)
its a rough setup (took me several tries, a couple days, and a couple shots to finally get right, and im nowhere near a novice) but if thats what would solve your problem grab a copy of SIPDroid (off the google code page, not the market), a GV invite, a PBXes account, a SIPSorcery account (all of the preceding are free services). A SIP provider will also be nessicary (some are free and some arent, i use SIPGate, which is free the way i use it/ have it set up).
look around on google for some tutorials (id link to one, but none were complete, or were old, i had to piece the info together from several tutorials, the SIPDroid page, PBXes help pages, and some common sense)

I'll look into it

worst case it'll allow you to still use your G1 for calls on Wifi over SIP after you change service providers (and phones) if you dont grab another android (or even if you do for that matter, with the proper setup ofcourse)...

[IDEA] USING VOIP OF NEXUS ONE from OTHER PHONE

Hi guys i got idea here, hope its possible, as android is open source, anything can be routed to anywhere, only if i had that talent to do programming on ANDROID i would have tried it. Look at picture and you would understand

why not just use the access number for your SIP provider? that way you can make a VoIP call for the cost of a normal phone call to the access number.
Callwithus is a good SIP provider for this purpose as it has reliable access numbers to use. I think Callcentric and voip.ms do as well.

what if i dont have local call number for my sip providers? only thing i can hope for best is this. Think of calling to USA while living in INDIA, when u dont have local access numbers nor do have internet.??

bhanvadia said:
Hi guys i got idea here, hope its possible, as android is open source, anything can be routed to anywhere, only if i had that talent to do programming on ANDROID i would have tried it. Look at picture and you would understand
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm probably missing something obvious, but why can't you just use the N1 to make the VOIP call directly?

all someone has to do is incorporate sip and stuff into a single program.

well nexus one is my primary phone and its always connected to internet, but my gf dont have nexus, nor do she got smartphone with voip, so if she wants to call there, and i m in office, i wanted something that can make that possible.
Almost free kind of calling, she call my NEXUS, and make my nexus dial her wanted number using SIP over WIFI, so virtually she talking through my NEXUS but speaking in her phone.

bhanvadia said:
what if i dont have local call number for my sip providers? only thing i can hope for best is this. Think of calling to USA while living in INDIA, when u dont have local access numbers nor do have internet.??
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
In that case, Callwithus has a feature.. they have a special access number that doesn't actually pick up (so that you will not be charged). the system will then call you back and prompt you to enter the number you want to dial, routes it over VoIP, and you're connected. check it out.

it wont work. it would cost like double for me. and one more thing, its not that what i want or what i can?
its just IDEA so that XDA community can make it possible. Its like exploring possibility of Android OS, to make it as a SERVER to forward calls received in GSM, through VoIP.
Its something thats never been done, or never even tried by anyone.
The basic is
1st person calls nexus one phone [local number so it be cheap]
NEXUS pick up call automatically {developed server software running}
NEXUS beeps[this mean sipdorid active][so can now enter number (international, which could have been deep hole in pocked if called direct)]
1st person, enter desired number as DTMF, and press # to confirm.
NEXUS dials that number though VoIP SIPDROID. Phone connected. And join that VoIP call with GSM call.

bhanvadia said:
it wont work. it would cost like double for me. and one more thing, its not that what i want or what i can?
its just IDEA so that XDA community can make it possible. Its like exploring possibility of Android OS, to make it as a SERVER to forward calls received in GSM, through VoIP.
Its something thats never been done, or never even tried by anyone.
The basic is
1st person calls nexus one phone [local number so it be cheap]
NEXUS pick up call automatically {developed server software running}
NEXUS beeps[this mean sipdorid active][so can now enter number (international, which could have been deep hole in pocked if called direct)]
1st person, enter desired number as DTMF, and press # to confirm.
NEXUS dials that number though VoIP SIPDROID. Phone connected. And join that VoIP call with GSM call.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's the problem with the idea--there is currently no way to bridge the SIP call with the GSM call. Even call recorder apps (post-Donut) are not possible because Android does not allow access to the incoming audio. Even if somehow you compiled your own custom kernel and ROM to accomplish that, your problem would be that neither Sipdroid nor 3CXPhone allow bridging calls other than SIP (as they are native SIP clients that do not interface with GSM). Perhaps if Gingerbread gives access to incoming audio, something could be done.
as for the callback approach "costing double," that's just not true. Termination to India (landline and mobiles) is only 1 US cent. Plus, you will not be using any of your airtime credit because it will be an incoming call for you, so in the end you save quite a bit of money since you will only be paying the usual rate + 1 cent per minute. (So, a call to the U.S. would cost you a total of 1.9 cents/min, for example.)
That's the practical solution to your issue.

its not issue, and there are no number in that website for india. and one more thing, google allow us to control audio, thats how AUDIO mod came out, and also thats how A2DP bluetooth started to work on desire roms with FM. Plus if we see, sipdroid as opensource, and someone developes way to do that, i m sure sipdroid team will do it possible to use sip with that.

bhanvadia said:
its not issue, and there are no number in that website for india. and one more thing, google allow us to control audio, thats how AUDIO mod came out, and also thats how A2DP bluetooth started to work on desire roms with FM. Plus if we see, sipdroid as opensource, and someone developes way to do that, i m sure sipdroid team will do it possible to use sip with that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unfortunately, as I said, Android does not expose the incoming audio stream from a GSM call.
That has nothing to do with FM radio or A2DP, since those are not related to GSM calls.
And you can indeed use Callwithus from India by using either the caller-ID based callback feature as I explained before, or by using their web callback feature. Either way, their system will call you and then connect the call and you will not have to use up any of your airtime credit since it would be an incoming call for you. You would pay the usual termination rate (plus the 1 cent/min charge for terminating your end of the call to your India number)

Caller ID Question:

I have a question regarding Caller ID.
Over the years with CallerID feature I always thought that caller's name & phone number would display even if it is not in my contact list. It would only show the phone number of the caller. That is how it has been ever since I had cellphone.
Previously I had HTC Magic and even that phone would only display the phone number only for callers that was not in my list.
Now not too long ago I purchased a Bell's Samsung Galaxy S i9000 which was rooted and already had JPK running. I currently have it running on Rogers Wireless Network. Sure enough even with this phone only callers' number would display.
Few days ago I actually flashed back to the stock firmware for this phone, which is JH2 firmware. I was suprised to see that phone would now display the name of the caller! +obviously the number, even if it was not listed on my contacts! (I actually received a call from wrong number). What is more shocking? was that I used my Skype(PC) to do a test call and as usually it would display with funny phone numbers like 01234567, etc... BUT! it literally displayed my Skype(PC)'s user name !!
So my question is, what is required to display the unknown callers name? and not just the number as usual?
I am sure it is not hardware based but up to the phone's operating system?
Could someone explain this to me?
Thank you.

Firmware aside
one thing i do know, is that there are 2 Caller ID services now in day in all Canadian/USA telcos (not sure about internationals)
the standard old caller ID if paid or included in your plan, you will always get the phone number of the person calling you, unless the dialing person brocked it.
the NEW caller ID which is usually an extra fee to enable or included in your plan, will show your the caller ID name (even if it's not in your address book) if it's not broked
so from your experiment, it appears that some firmwares are missing the support for the NEW caller ID feature

Google Voice did not ring on incoming calls for my Pixel 5

Google Voice did not ring on incoming calls for my Pixel 5. I tried all the online advice I could find but still failed. After 2 weeks of experimenting, I stumbled on a workaround today! I am still asking this question online so that I can share it with the public.
Many online blogs acknowledge this is a Google bug and the most prevalent workaround is to “use carrier only” for “Making and receiving calls” under Google Voice settings.
"Use carrier only" unfortunately is not much of a solution for those who travel internationally! Google Voice would expect this carrier to be a U.S. company during configuration. Roaming internationally on a U.S. carrier number runs up a HUUUGE phone bill! It begs the question of why even bother with GV if I want to involve my U.S. carrier number when I travel overseas. If I were in the U.S. today, with my unlimited plan, I would see no reasons to use GV either except if I just want to have a separate phone number that is always mine. "use carrier only" is totally brain dead from the cost perspective.
When I was on my Samsung S4, I didn't have this problem. Finally, I decided to upgrade to Pixel 5 and GV stopped ringing for an incoming call.
After I upgraded to Pixel 5, I wiped clean my S4 thinking I would either donate it or give it to a kid as a toy. Out of curiosity, I installed GV again on my S4 today to see if it still works. GV does NOT treat my S4 as a separate device but as the same "Android Device" on my Pixel 5. I guess this is due to both phones are logging into the same account. I then called my GV number and my Pixel started to ring! Curiously, S4 didn't ring. As an experiment, I opened the notification settings of the GV app on my S4 and customized it to the way I wanted it. Now, when I called my GV number, the Pixel didn't ring but the S4 rang! After that, I tried both disabling notifications on the S4 for GV and turning off S4, both methods would enable the Pixel to ring again!
Since the Pixel 5 would ring when the S4 is turned off, what would happen if GV is uninstalled from the S4? Well, the Pixel 5 stops ringing! I re-installed GV on the S4 and called my GV number, the S4 started to ring while the Pixel remained silent. This contrasts the situation after the 1st installation, ie. the Pixel rang instead.
Here is my observation:
*Both phones must have GV installed to work.
*GV would only ring one of the 2 phones, but it's hard to say which phone would ring if both are on and the notifications are enabled on both
*By disabling notifications on the S4 or turning off the phone, the Pixel always rings
*Now I can use GV either over Wi-Fi or my European SIM (traveling in Eu currently) to receive and make calls
For those who are writing these what to do with an old phone blogs, I guess they can add this workaround to their list, ie. to fix a bug for Google! I assume the old one has to be a device that doesn't have this problem to begin with. Haha.