Attendant Answer

[Ken62]

Hi everyone.  New to the OBI and have a question I am sure someone can easily answer.  I have my GV setup to forward calls to my cell phone.  The problem is when I call my GV number from my cell phone GV answers instead of the OBI attendant.  If I "uncheck" forward to my cell phone, GV still answers and not the OBI attendant.  It is not until I delete my cell phone from GV then the OBI attendant will answer.  My question is can I have the OBI attendant answer when I call from my cell phone AND have calls to my GV number forwarded to my cell phone?  If so, I guess I am missing a setting somewhere.

[SteveInWA]

Hi Ken:

I'm not the expert on the auto-attendant, but I am the GV guy.  When you call your GV phone number from some other phone (be it your forwarding phone, or some unrelated phone number), you're calling the Google Voice system, not your OBi.  So, GV is going to handle the call itself, according to its own rules.  When calling from a forwarding number, GV will (depending on a GV setting) either send you directly into your voicemail administrator menu, or ring your GV number first, and require you to press the star (*) key to barge in.   The OBi is just another forwarding destination, as far as GV is concerned, emulating a computer logged into your Google account using Google Chat.

By contrast, if you have a SIP service provider configured, the call is terminating on your OBi, which answers the call, and can the OBi can thus pre-process it and decide if it should send your call to the auto attendant or not, based on caller ID.

Perhaps one of the other frequent posters here will explain the attendant behavior in more detail, and how to deal with this, but you may need to get a SIP DID (inbound phone number) to make it work.

[Ken62]

OK.  Well this is interesting.  When I call GV from a "trusted phone" other than a forwarded phone, I get the OBI attendant.  Is this not supposed to happen?

So, now a very stupid question... how do I dial my OBI without calling GV with a trusted phone?  When I dial the 9 digits 510xxxyyy I get an answer of we cannot complete your call as dialed.  I have tried **9 and **8 in front of the 9 digits and it rings twice then hangs up. Sorry for the dumb question.

[SteveInWA]

When you call GV from a phone that isn't a forwarding phone, the call is indeed just getting forwarded to Google Chat, which rings your OBi.  At that point, the OBi AA takes over.

You can try experimenting by changing the Voicemail access setting on this page to not send your forwarding phone directly into your VM menu:  https://www.google.com/voice#phones

Click the Edit button under your cell phone number, then click "Show advanced settings" to get to the Voicemail access setting.  I can't remember how this behaves with GV, whether or not it creates a call forwarding loop, but you'll quickly find out.

[Ken62]

That did it!  Just changed voice mail access in advanced settings from Yes to No.  Seems like it's working now.  Really appreciate your help. Thank you very much.

[SteveInWA]

Great, thanks for confirming it!

Your post also reminded me:  if you don't want to deal with having the OBi-attached phone ring first, as a result of the VM Access setting you just changed, you can instead use your cell phone carrier's * command to temporarily disable caller ID.  GV should then behave as if you are calling from a phone other than the one that's on the GV forwarding phones list.