Hijinks Inc. » Google Voice

Answer Google Voice Calls in Gmail

Aaron Nelsen — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 16:30:01 +0000

So you’ve been having a grand old time making phone calls from Gmail, but maybe you’re like me and you’d like to actual answer incoming calls in Gmail. Good news, Google’s got you covered and it’s really simple to setup.

Here’s how to enable it:

Step 1: Login to your Google Voice account.

Step 2: Click Settings, and select Voice settings.

It should automatically load to your Phones tab, at the bottom of your “Forward to” list you should now have a Google Chat option, just check the box next to it and you’re good to go.

You’ll now get a Caller ID like popup when you have an incoming call, and of course you can also answer the call from within your browser now.

Tip: You can also transfer calls from your Gmail to your regular phone by pressing * while in a call. This works to transfer calls from your phone to Gmail as well.

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Making a Phone Call in Gmail

Aaron Nelsen — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:10:24 +0000

The recently rumored voice calling option is already live on all of my Gmail accounts, not sure if everyone else is seeing it, or if users with existing Google Voice accounts got it added automatically. At any rate, voice calling works fairly well. Though in my tests people on the other end complained of frequent static even though I could hear them just fine.

All my out going calls showed up as coming from my Google Voice number, so I’m making the assumption that you’ll need to have a Google Voice account for this to work.

Making a call is simple, just select Call phone from the Chat box on the left hand side of your Gmail window and a dialer will popup.

Start typing either a name of a contact or there phone number and Gmail will provide auto-complete search results, since I already use Google Voice for my business this worked amazingly well because all my contacts already had phone numbers attached. If the number your dialing isn’t attached to a contact, just enter it normally.

Click on a name or press enter to start dialing.

After your call is completed, either click End or wait for the person on the other end to hangup.

There you have it! That’s all there is to it.

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Google Adding VoIP to Gmail? [Updated]

Aaron Nelsen — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 16:30:26 +0000

After Google bought GrandCentral everyone expected them to release a desktop VoIP application, didn’t happen. Then Google bought Gizmo5, which was basically a VoIP desktop application, now everyone thinks it’s a sure fire thing. Again, nothing. And now there’s a rumor that Google is adding VoIP to Gmail. Please, oh, please be true.

Sure, you already have a Google Voice account and can just login to Google Voice to make a phone call or even install a browser plugin/extension to add the ability to turn any phone number into a callable hotlink. But think how convenient it would be to just login to Gmail every morning, like you already do, and see a popup with missed calls, voicemails, etc. and have the ability to return those calls from within that browser window and, best part, use your internet connection to make the call.

This would seem to be a no-brainer move for Google, but then again, I thought adding Gizmo5 functionality to their GoogleTalk client was a no-brainer move as well. The rumor claims that you’ll be able to call the US and Canada for free, with the option to purchase international call time for “insanely low rates”. Seems plausible.

Where’d this rumor start you ask? CNet’s Tom Krazit posted yesterday saying they received the tip along with a couple screenshots (see above). Google’s official comment on this rumor?

Google is always testing new features and products, but we have nothing specific to announce right now.

Thanks, that’s really helpful. Stay tuned for updates, hopefully we’ll see this confirmed in the coming weeks.

Note: For what it’s worth, the 415 area code is the San Franciso area, just down the street from Mountain View, CA and the Googleplex.

Update: That didn’t take long, Engadget says Google has made it official.

And it looks like it’s already available on my account.

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60 Days Without Voice Service

Aaron Nelsen — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 23:30:12 +0000

Its officially been sixty days since I last made a phone call on my iPhone that wasn’t over VoIP and life is good. Not only do I have $200+ extra dollars in my bank account but I haven’t had a dropped call either. I’d say all things considered, my iPhone 3G is aging rather well.

Since my last update, I’ve used 803 minutes of talk time and 649 text messages. 90% of my calls were incoming, so I wasn’t really bothered by the indirect method required for placing a call. The only real change I’ve made to my setup is I’ve switched over the to G.729 codec for calls (both over WiFi and 3G) with good results, though it does require an in-app purchase from Acrobits Softphone but it seems to be worth it so far.

One drawback I’ve run into is the fact that I can’t send or receive picture messages with my Google Voice number, I can of course just attach the photo to an email and most cell phones will accept it as a picture message (assuming you send them to the appropriately formatted mobile email address), but trying to explain to all my friends that they need to send their photos to my email has proved to be a bit more of a problem. It’s not the end of the world, especially since a good portion of photos both my friends and myself want to share end up uploaded to TwitPic or another similar service, but it might be an issue for some.

I would like to take this oppurtunity to point out this blurb I ran across in an article on TUAW (which doesn’t merit its own article):

Guerra made me promise to mention that MicroSIM adapters were pioneered by Aaron at hijinksinc.

That’s right folks, I apparently am a pioneer. Certainly news to me.

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30 Days Without Voice Service

Aaron Nelsen — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 19:33:43 +0000

Yesterday marked day number thirty since I posted my walk-through on how to use your iPad 3G ‘s Micro SIM in an iPhone for data only service, and more importantly its been thirty days since I last used AT&T’s voice service to make a call. While I’ve been using only VoIP to make calls and send texts, I did leave my service active until June 1st just incase things didn’t work very well. But as of the first, I am no longer paying for AT&T voice service.

As you might have concluded from the canceling of my service I’m happy to report, that at least in my neck of the woods, using data only with Google Voice, GV Mobile, IPKall, Backgrounder, and Acrobits Softphone has been a smashing success. While I admit that it’s not as straight forward to place calls, it’s still easy to receive them. Which fits quite nicely with my phone usage.

Overall call quality was surprisingly good, naturally it worked better over WiFI, but it was more than passible over 3G. Over the course of those 30 days I only used 291 minutes of talk time, but I sent over 1,000 texts and used over 16GBs of data streaming content. I also installed MyWi to use my iPhone as a hotspot so my iPad could still browse the net from anywhere I had 3G coverage.

How my setup works is simple(ish). IPKall provides a SIP number for my Google Voice account to call, which rings to Acrobits Softphone, so if I use GV Mobile to dial a number it then rings my iPhone via that IPKall SIP number. Along those same lines, anytime someone calls my Google Voice number the call rings through to my iPhone using Acrobits Softphone. You can find instructions on how to setup SIP calling in this post.

Texting is handle through Mail.app as I have Google Voice forward my texts to my email. For a more real time texting experience I used Boxcar configured with my Gmail account to push notifications of text messages and new voicemails. I can also use GV Mobile or Google Voice’s own website to send texts from my phone.

I did try all of this without jailbreaking my iPhone, and while it works, I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s a bit more complicated to do things like make calls or even answer them (opening Softphone is rather slow). Plus, jailbreaking was necessary in my case since I wanted to run Softphone in the background and completely remove Apple’s Phone.app from the phone so it wouldn’t continue running and using memory (be advised, this removes your ability to call E911 in an emergency).

I will admit this option isn’t quite as appealing since AT&T decided to change their iPad data plans, but for those lucky enough to still have unlimited data it might be worth a try. I’ll likely post another update in 30 days or so, as I refine the process.

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Google Voice Invites

Aaron Nelsen — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 07:01:24 +0000

I’m sure they won’t go as fast as the Google Wave invites, but I have 3 Google Voice invites left.

Leave your email in the comments, or hit me up on Twitter.

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