Google Voice VoIP Calls Will Be Live For Everyone by Next Week (androidpolice.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google took a long, long break from Google Voice a while back. After letting the app fall into disrepair, Google expressed a renewed commitment to Voice in 2017. It has since announced a handful of feature updates, including VoIP calling in 2018. However, that feature never actually rolled out to everyone. Google's Scott Johnston says it's almost time, though. We know that some Voice users got VoIP calling as far back as September. Like far too many Google features lately, this is a server-side change and not controlled by an app update. For some unknown reason, Google has dragged its feet rolling it out to everyone. According to Johnston, things are back on track and the VoIP calling feature will be live for all users by next week.If you're looking for another option besides Google Voice, check out alternatives.

Comments

Everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

meaning red blooded americans...?

Re: Everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Literally no one gives a shit about google or any of its idiotic plans

Re: Everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm...I do....

So perhaps "Figuratively no one gives a shit..."

But "Literally"?? nope.

Re: Everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, strictly speaking, which seems yo be your bent, to literally give shit about something like this seems unlikely, so I'd say the winner here probably is literally.

"Trust Google"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not like they'd just farm your data out to the highest bidder, they've got a multicolor logo and a slogan to match. What's the worst that could happen?

https://mobilesyrup.com/2018/08/22/google-data-collection-report/

Re: "Trust Google"

[Anonymous Coward]

But hey thanks for telling us who your vendors are so we can avoid them too

Re: "Trust Google"

[Anonymous Coward]

Google does not deserve VOIP

Re: "Trust Google"

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought this was a half duplex service but it turns out to be full duplex. I was not expecting the sound to be as good as it was. It has a contract though but itâ(TM)s only one page. What else did I miss when I stopped counting on VOIP because of the odd humming that was omnipresent

Re: "Trust Google"

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you smoking?

Re:"Trust Google"

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing is, Apple does the same.

Companies bid to have their search engine set as the default in Safari. They're just as complacent as everyone else.

I really wish Linux would get their act together more

Obi box

[kalpol]

I've had VOIP via Google for years, both on a laptop and with a regular old phone on an Obi box. Do they just mean they're adding this functionality to the mobile application?

Re:Obi box

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. They're making a hub that interconnects their apps.

I will use this!

[Anonymous Coward]

For the same reason I let Facebook scrape my contact list. I absolutely want the world's biggest surveillance and advertising company to know everyone I call.

Re: I will use this!

[Anonymous Coward]

You did? Thatâ(TM)s nice. Did you save and upload your non-Facebook contacts too?

Re:I will use this!

[HornWumpus]

That ship sailed a long time ago.

Not Google but NSA/GCHQ etc (and yes, they've got your google profile, DNS, torrents etc etc). It's not even a conspiracy theory anymore, just a fact.

'3 eyes' is when the ship officially sailed, 1945. They kept metadata (who people had called) on paper. We spy on England, England spys on us (Australia etc etc), everybody shares. Nobodies constitution gets 'violated'. Privacy shmivacy.

Free anon services are an invitation to poison the well.

Re:I will use this!

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't worry about the NSA because the NSA isn't selling your data secretly out the backdoor, moron. Google/FB/Amazon do. Pay attention stupid.

Re:I will use this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google isn't selling your data either? Google's data is way better and more comprehensive than what any of their competitors have. That's their big competitive advantage. If they sell that, what do they have left? No, Google allows advertisers to target their ads, and the targeting is done on Googles side using their private data. But Google does NOT sell your data or otherwise let anyone have direct access to it (except most likely the government, for whatever national security letter's they've received and can't tell us about)

Re:I will use this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah bullshit. They sell access to it in shades, but you're relying on them living up to their words to protect the whole. When has that trust been borne out?

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/google-sells-future-powered-your-personal-data-n870501

“This is one of the craziest things about the modern age, we would never let the government or a corporation put cameras/microphones in our homes or location trackers on us, but we just went ahead and did it ourselves because I want to watch cute dog videos,”

How Google collects data from Gmail users and what it uses that data for has been a particularly sensitive topic. In June 2017, Google said it would stop scanning Gmail messages in order to sell targeted ads. After this article was published, Google’s confirmation that it does still collect data from the email of Gmail users drew attention from some journalists that cover technology and digital privacy.

Re: I will use this!

[Anonymous Coward]

Naturally!

Re:I will use this!

[Tokolosh]

Google, FB et al. do not assert the right to lock me up for my "Three Felonies a Day", or to drone strike me without due process.

Re:I will use this!

[rtb61]

Silly person. It is Google, the worlds biggest VOICE RECOGNITION, handling all you VOICE calls, oh yeah, your conversations will be private, yep, uh huh. Fucking hell, it is not about who you are calling, it is about using computerised voice recognition to analyse the entire conversation, and convert all your privacy into their data, to facilitate control and psychological manipulation. Will or will they not, provide encryption on all of those calls, there is you answer, right fucking there. Google are a pack of suck fuckers. Look at their CEO applauding the political activism whilst behind the scenes lobbying as the highest spending lobbyists, to fucking criminalise it, oh we didn't ban political activism for out employees the government did because yeah, Google is trying to pay them to do it.

Google as evil as it gets for a corporation, the fame social justice faÃade over the slimiest scummiest democracy hating douche bags. People need to stop believing the Google feel good marketing bullshit.

Re:I will use this!

[Sir Holo]

Some of you will remember anon.penet.fi, a free email anonymizer from the 1990's. I used it a few times back in the late 1990's because I was aware of the security and privacy risks of 'regular' email. That is, 'plain Jane' risks of snooping on personal conversations.

Today, in 2018, I google my real name, and up come some of those anonymized emails, of which no copy was supposed to have ever existed, much less been kept on some server for 20+ years.

They were benign emails, but... privacy. So, I guess I was right about that privacy thing.

Nothing ever goes away once it traverses the internet. And there is no such thing as free (as in beer).

Re:I will use this!

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

I remember anon.penet.fi.

Another useful service that was trashed by spammers abusing it.

Re: I will use this!

[Lenny369]

Today, in 2018?

Re:I will use this!

[duketor]

I'm sure the SUPO and JSCU have copies of every email that went through there. Julf was based in the Netherlands with a Finnish address.

That'll be nice - ditch Hangouts

[ripvlan]

This has always confused me and shown how little integration / solution Google has in these areas. I've had Voice since it was GrandCentral. Works great as a PBX. Sure I could answer calls from inside GMail on my PC (strange integration), I had to use Hangouts to "chat" and Talk to my friends on a computer for those without a phone number, but never worked on mobile. This has always required a decoder ring to keep track of which app to use for each feature. Voice has been lacking and frankly I was getting ready for it to disappear, like I said I used it as a PBX to route my calls and not have to give out my real phone# (plural).

I'm hopeful it'll grow. Although I'm not sure what else "the phone" can do. GOOG-411 is done (replaced by Okay Google).

We'll see.

Re:That'll be nice - ditch Hangouts

[AHuxley]

The ads are integrated.

Only to be shelved in 2020....

[Anonymous Coward]

Google have a history of working on something, giving it a second chance, then shelving it, leaving all the users in the lurch.

Tick tick tick on this one as well...

Lasting the next 6 months

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like everything else from google they axed.
I got 20 bucks stuck in my google voice account after they axed xmpp and motif support.
I'll just stay away from them. I wish i had an easy way out of gmail too, now that i got rid of google search

Re: Lasting the next 6 months

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I bet they have some special deal with Cisco too to virtualize coup through the cloud

why? Minutes

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone still have minutes on their phone plans ?

Re:why? Minutes

[Anonymous Coward]

I never grasped the "minutes" thing. Or, even worse, "air time". What did that exactly mean? That I could make a call to somebody in, say, Seoul, South Korea, for free, as long as I wouldn't go over my "minutes" of free "air time"? Of course not.

How about SIP service?

[pepsikid]

Give me SIP service again!

I've had Google Voice since it was Grand Central, making and receiving calls with a SIP ATA on a normal desk phone. When they scuttled SIP, I used Asterisk PBX to bridge the gap via an XMPP extension. Now they've scuttled XMPP, and the remaining solution (aside from using Google Hangouts on a PC with a headset) is a hack which shares a single certificate ferreted out of an Obihai ATA. Google's current protocol actually IS SIP, but with funky headers and flags. It's been partly reverse-engineered by the community. Google literally went to extra trouble to make it incompatible with industry-standard IP telephony. I guess that was to try and make it an asset to attract people to their G+ ecosystem.

I want to connect my collection of SIP IP phones straight to Google again. Or, at least have an intermediary which signs on with my Google credentials on one side, and offers SIP service within my LAN. Even a Pidgin plugin would be nice - I'd just leave it running 24/7 and my phones could interface with it.

Re:How about SIP service?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who gives a flying fuck what you want. You are the product not the customer. Now sit down, shut the fuck up, and take what your given up the hoop and stop whimpering.

And do not worry. In a couple of years when we have harvested and stolen all the data we can from this shenanigan, we will simply close it down like we did with Giggle Plus.
.

Re:How about SIP service?

[dissy]

I didn't even know about the Obihai certificate hack until reading your post.

Ultimately I let all my google voice trunk services just die two months ago when they shut down XMPP.

I had two SIP extensions, both handsets tossed back in the boxes, and I just moved one number to an iOS client on my cell.
Noticed that the junk calls have been skyrocketing to that number lately so will probably turn that off too.

Otherwise I only had a "toy" IVR and incoming fax set of trunks I don't even care about. Asterisk is still running but I'm assuming has been failing its reconnect attempts since last November. Not even inclined to shut it down, let alone find another working solution.

If there is even one good thing about the incumbent phone companies, once they deploy something they tend to keep it running exactly the same way for decades.
5ESS switches still 40 years later support pulse-dialing, when 2/3rds of the US population has no idea such a feature ever existed or what that is, let alone know it still works.

That's longer than Google has existed let alone managed to keep a service of theirs running consistently.

Re:How about SIP service?

[pepsikid]

@dissy: Everyone using naf's "GVSIP" was sharing the same cert pulled out of one Obihai device. Google let this go on, but finally reached out to various hobbyist teams to tell them to knock it off. I don't know if it still works because I never set it up on my Asterisk server. The nitwits who were integrating "GVSIP" into my flavor of Asterisk had no intention of doing it properly, and projected really bad customer service. I shut down my Asterisk server, since I don't really need all the features, though having all of my calls logged and recorded was very nice. It managed 5 GV numbers used by 3 family members.

I have an Obihai, but it's the early one and they killed the GV feature it had. It's physically capable of still bridging GV to POTS, but they decline to patch it's firmware. The one I have still works as an ATA. You have to buy a later version to have GV now, but you can enable SIP relay on those and use it as a standalone PBX server for your SIP IP phone. Maybe I'll drop $50 on one of those eventually; it's still way cheaper than a phone line. You can maybe extract your unique cert from your own Obi to plug into GVSIP too.

Your Asterisk PBX is probably still connected to your GV accounts and doesn't even know it can't get or make GV calls. Google didn't take down the chat network, which is how motif/XMPP maintained presence. Google's XMPP server just won't obey voice call commands any more.

For a while, one outfit was selling a Windows app that sat in your task bar, logged into your GV account in XMPP mode, and provided a SIP server to your ATA or IP phones on the LAN. It would be nice if someone did that with the new GV protocol. Actually, would be better as a Linux service, since I have several of those running 24/7 which could host it.

Re:How about SIP service?

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.voip.ms/

Supports SIP, works perfectly with Asterisk and is not Google.

Re:How about SIP service?

[pepsikid]

and is not free. \o_O/ ..but doesn't look bad I admit.

Re:How about SIP service?

[TJ_Phazerhacki]

Google's current protocol actually IS SIP, but with funky headers and flags.

Ah, the old 'Avaya' strategy. Bold move Cotton, let's see how it works out for them...

Re:How about SIP service?

[Radworker]

When they finally ceased supporting XMPP (how many years after the announcement did they drop support?) I bought an ObiHai ATA and set my asterisk pbx to use the Obihai as a trunk. Problem solved at least until they pull the plug on GV as a whole. Then I port my number over to my SIP provider.

Re:How about SIP service?

[sydbarrett74]

Google's current protocol actually IS SIP, but with funky headers and flags.

Funny how Google is now doing the same 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish' shit that MS did twenty years ago, whilst MS is actually open-sourcing a lot of their technology. What's old is new again, I guess...

where "all users" = USA

[akorvemaker]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Google Voice is only available in a whopping 1 of the 195 nations on this planet.

I had an account with a competitor named Gizmo back in the day. It routed calls over SIP directly to my Nokia N810. Worked beautifully here. Then Google bought Gizmo, shut it down, and still doesn't offer anything to those living in such far-off, mythical lands as... Canada.

I'm still grumpy about that.

Re:where "all users" = USA

[93 Escort Wagon]

We all know Canada is like Narnia, except without lions.

Re:where "all users" = USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Google Voice is only available in a whopping 1 of the 195 nations on this planet.

So start your own tech company and stop bitching about ours because their in our country.

Anyway, Google blew away my Voice stuff when I signed up for Project Fi a few years ago. Project Fi turned out to be over priced if you actually wanted to use any data, so I don't have either anymore.

That's the thing about Google; They'll fuck up your stuff at any moment and without warning.

Re:where "all users" = USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Meh. Since Rush has retired I don't care too much about the comings and goings of Canada. Prior to that it was a fine country.

Re:where "all users" = USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Not true.
http://www.canadianguideoutfitters.com/hunts_mountain_lion.php

Re: where "all users" = USA

[Anonymous Coward]

what does google offer (besides privacy rape) that voip.ms doesn't do better in Canada?

Re:where "all users" = USA

[Anonymous Coward]

I just did a quick test of this Google Voice crap on iPhone.
They basically removed a bunch of Hangouts functionality (like google chat and video) and added a better voice codec for voip. That's it.

The application itself is shit. You can't even do basic thing like view messages in google voice application during a google voice call. You could easily do this in Hangouts.

No Idea how I can call my bank that sends verification code in message that I need to read back. I doubt they test their shit. It's Google afterall.

Back to Hangouts.

Re:where "all users" = USA

[akorvemaker]

But Hangouts (in Canada) doesn't offer a phone number for incoming calls. Google Voice does.

Re:where "all users" = USA

[P3Ed]

I too had a Gizmo account on a n810, then used the account on a PBX (still running) for roll over on busy for a land line. When Google shut it down, I had 10$ on account, but no way to collect a refund. I switched to working VOIP provider and moved on, but I started to get that MS feeling form Google that day. Just one of the many reasons I run LineageOS with out G apps on my phone now.

Re:where "all users" = USA

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Rush has retired I don't care too much about the comings and goings of Canada.

They're getting back together. Said they're still not too old to rock. They are going to change their name to Mosey, though.

For very select numbers of everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

I know slashdot is based in the US, but seriously, even in the US people should realize that US != everyone.

Re:For very select numbers of everyone

[Anonymous Coward]

Many even call the USA, America, when they are just a part of it. As UK is a part of Europe. Oh wait!

Re:For very select numbers of everyone

[Gonoff]

Or England is part of the UK...

The delay in rolling this out

[Anonymous Coward]

The delay was probably due to a hold up in their "shut service down by surprise" document. All Google projects now require a plan not only for rolling them out but snatching them back again.

Yeah!

[Gravis Zero]

I want SIP ATA in the PBX with my XMPP cuz my XMPP is no longer working with my SIP LAN IP because I totally know acronyms too. ;)

For *everyone*?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it really for real for everyone, everyone?
Or is it fucking still just in the US?

Why the fuck do you have a google voice app in Canada, google?! It doesnâ(TM)t fucking do shit!

VOIP is great

[theblkadder]

So now Google will be able to listen in on your phone calls as well.

Re:VOIP is great

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. Was just going to say that.

Even if they allowed p-t-p encryption to protect your actual audio, it's just too creepy to give them all your realtime contacts and call metadata.

Crashed within 5 minutes

[Pow]

Decided to give it a go on iPhone.

I use Hangouts with Google phone number (voip). It works quite well and integrates nicely with Apple's CallKit.

* Google Voice is crippled Hangouts functionality. Why would they cut the Google talk functionality (or whatever it's called nowadays) - chat, voice and video between gmail users?

* No way to browse Google Voice application (like settings, messages, etc) while in call. This works just fine in Hangouts, but hey, it's Google. Probably a new dev team rewriting everything from scratch and reinventing the wheel.

* Finally it crashed on me while I tried a combination of sending myself SMS messages to Google Voice number while in Google Voice voip call. The call suddenly disconnected and when I started application it asked me if I want to send crash report.

Uninstalled and reconnected my Hangouts to Google phone number voice calls and SMS messages.

Interested to try it

[John.Banister]

If this compensates for my phone's inability to do VoLTE, that would be nice. Last year I could wifi tether my VOIP service to my cellular data, but that no longer works.

Everyone you say?

[Anonymous Coward]

"rolling out to `everyone`"? Really

By everyone I presume the OP means just the USA (i.e. 4.5% of "Everyone")?

Re:Everyone you say?

[Gonoff]

"rolling out to `everyone`"? Really

By everyone I presume the OP means just the USA (i.e. 4.5% of "Everyone")?

Or 2% of everywhere