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

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!

[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!

[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:Obi box

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:That'll be nice - ditch Hangouts

[AHuxley]

The ads are integrated.

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?

[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.

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

[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.

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.