OBiTALK Community

General Support => Day-to-Day Use => Topic started by: Darkavalanche on February 24, 2011, 03:06:10 PM

Title: Answering Machine instead of Google Voice
Post by: Darkavalanche on February 24, 2011, 03:06:10 PM
I did a lot of searching, and I wasn't able to find the answer to this question.  Save for changing my answering machine to answering after a single ring, is there any way to have my answering machine pick up calls from my 110 rather than having Google Voice do so?  Please note, this is NOT a cell phone, but rather a touch tone attached to my 110 that ultimately I'd like to attend my calls if possible.
Title: Re: Answering Machine instead of Google Voice
Post by: Loughary on February 24, 2011, 03:11:54 PM
My understanding is no...GV does not have a option to turn off voice mail...I guess Google decided that we couldn't live without their voice mail.  The only option that I've found is to have a actual physical answering machine that you can change the amount of rings before it picks up...my GV picks up after 4 rings so I had to change my machine to pickup after 2 which kind of sucks.
Title: Re: Answering Machine instead of Google Voice
Post by: MichiganTelephone on February 24, 2011, 08:25:09 PM
As Loughary points out, there is no way to disable Google Voice's voicemail.  Nor can you even change the number of rings (or seconds) before it goes to voicemail, which is rather irritating if you don't want to use it.

But once you have answered the call, Google Voice won't grab it back.  This is why on some Asterisk/FreePBX implementations, Google Voice calls are answered the moment they arrive on the system.  That means if someone's calling from a regular landline and it's a toll call, they get charged from the first ring, which isn't very nice but if you really want to use Asterisk's voicemail rather than Google Voice's, it's the only reliable way to do it.

The OBi devices do not have a way to "answer" the call prior to someone actually picking up the phone (short of routing the call to the auto-attendant, which you don't want to do unless you like paying for other people's calls).  Maybe there should be an option to immediately answer the Google Voice call, play a short message such as "Please hold while your call is connected", and then play ringback tone from the OBi until the call is answered.  The short message would serve to alert the caller that they're being charged for the call. Another possibility (maybe another option?) would be "Please press 1 to connect your call" - if the caller presses "1" it would play ringback tone to the caller and ring the phone, otherwise after a few seconds it would play a user-configurable tone (it could default to a "fast busy" a.k.a. "reorder" signal, but if the USER chooses to put in the three-tone SIT tone sequence that causes telemarketers to think they have reached a disconnected number, that would be up to them).  8)

The ideal situation would be to be able to let the incoming Google Voice call ring in the normal way as long as possible, and only when it's about to go to their voicemail answer the call and play the message (after sending the DTMF "1" to accept the call, of course) while ringing of the phone continues.  But now you're talking some serious additional complexity.  So, I don't think there are any really great solutions for this particular issue.