Hi All,
Brand new user. My wife inherited an old rotary phone from her grandfather and I thought it would be nice if I could put it to use for her. I bought the Obi200.
Again - it's rotary, so even registering the device was hard. I ultimately used a telephone tone generation app to play the ObiTalk registration tones through my desktop computer's external speakers into the rotary phone's mouthpiece. It took a couple tries, but I did successfully register the device that way.
It's configured with Google Voice now, which I think is working. (I'm brand new to GV too).
General confirmation that GV is good is that I can make and receive GV calls from my mobile phone and from the desktop computer. And if I call my GV number from my work phone, the rotary phone rings and I can answer and the call works.
But I want to be able to make outgoing calls. I don't want to buy a pulse->touchtone convertor, though I know that would be an option. I considered trying to make outgoing calls the same way I registered the device, by playing a wav file through my computer's speakers into the old rotary phone mouthpiece, but it doesn't work well (truthfully, it hasn't worked once - I tried a few times). I bet it would work sometimes but not consistently enough to be the solution.
This rotary phone is gong to sit on my wife's desk right next to her computer. I want her to be able to initiate the calls from the computer but use the rotary phone as the handset once the call is placed (like GV can do with a mobile phone). In my head I was thinking of my work situation where I can do this, but that's an enterprise VOIP system and the handset and software is all sold together by the VOIP provider.
I'm disappointed (my expecations were probably unfair) that so far at least, I don't see away to generate a call from the Obi200's webserver or from my ObiTalk account.
My wife could even use her mobile phone if that helps.
I'm not saying this desire to get this rotary phone working is practical, given that we could just use the computer as a GV softphone or her mobile phone. It's just one of those things that would be cool.
All I've really done so far is play with the Google Voice integration. Maybe there's no way to do it with GV? I am willing to try another supported service, other than GV. Though it would have to be one of those $2-3 per month services that charges for calls over 200 minutes or what-have-you. The phone isn't going to be used much so paying $20/month isn't something we can justify budget-wise.
So, has anyone solved this problem already? Or have an idea you think I should pursue? I'm hoping this is the kind of thing at least some other Forum members have worked through. Maybe not. I know rotary phones are old, old school.
FWIW, I did try to search the Forum for a posting on this, but I didn't turn anything up (except the pulse->touchtone convertor notion, which I appreciate but think will be too clumsy for my wife to deal with).
Like I said, I'm new here. Maybe I missed something painfully obvious. If so, I apologize in advance.
Thanks, all.