Neat little G-Voice Hack to have Anonymous callers dial *82 to unblock.

[Crow550]

In Google Voice go in your Settings and click the Groups & Circles Tab. Now find Anonymous Callers and click edit.

- Find Ring Default phones and click edit and uncheck all the phones. (Currently still rings Hangouts unfortunately.)

- Find Enable Call Screening for this group? and select Off.

- Now where it says When people in this group go to voicemail: select Record New and name it Unknown Callers or Anonymous Callers.

- You then put the phone to your Speakers or whatever way you want to record the audio message. Record 3 seconds of blank audio before playing the audio file.

- Go here: http://www.thisisarecording.com/anonymous-call-rejection.html and find an audio recording that tells "The party you are calling does not accept blocked calls If you are calling from a blocked number please hang up pick up the receiver press *82 and redial." (There is 3 of these recordings at the site. Just do a simple search on the page for *82.)

After the message plays continue recording 12-15 seconds of quiet audio or until the greeting time runs out then save it. 

- Make sure the Greetings is selected then click save on the bottom.

Done! Enjoy! Works really well.

Would be neat if Google Voice added this as a simple checkbox for anonymous callers but as it stands this works really well and not too difficult to do.

[Marty.ba.calif.usa]

Just curious... Do you really get a lot of anonymous callers?  My experience has been that the most annoying calls are from telemarketers who do have a callerID, but fake or temporary.  Usually, the only anonymous callers are people who simply chose to block their number thinking it provided some sort of security when calling businesses, not knowing that if they use the common 800 numbers, it won't even matter.

Does GV do a good job of blocking telemarketers?  I don't use GV, mainly because I wanted to block all telemarketer calls, and found a way to do that with a cheap Anveo account, back when GV was planning to pull a disappearing act.

[Crow550]

Well it's not like this was hard to do. So while not a ton. Do get some. Which actually get none now.

Google Voice has pretty decent Spam detection. You can go in the Spam folder and also Block them which does help.

So junk callers with G-Voice is pretty easy to deal with. Especially with the call screening. When they call you either let it ring and goto voicemail or answer and press 2 to send it to voicemail then mark as Spam and then block it.


To setup Google Voice's Call Screening on people not in your contacts. Just set it On under the Calls Tab with Ask unknown callers to say their name checked too.

Then under Groups and Circles for all contacts you can turn off the call screening.

My only gripe with call screening is that they didn't add a hands free option so you can say answer or send to voicemail....

I also believe Call Screening doesn't work with Google Chat method (and Google Hangouts) for Obihai devices unless this was fixed? So you could use one SP for Calling out with Google Chat (leave it unticked under Phones in the G-Voice settings) and another SP for Incoming Calls (make sure it's checked under Phones in the G-Voice settings) for about $18 a year ($1.50 a Month) for E911 and Incoming Caller ID support: http://www.callcentric.com/dids/free_phone_number

As the G-Chat method will only display the number to the Caller ID with no names. You could just add in your contacts to your Landline Phone which will display the name with the number of your contacts when they call you. Or speak it if you have Talking Caller ID with Panasonic. However using the Callcentric number as a forwarding number for incoming calls will also give you full Caller ID support and 911.

Instructions here for Call Centric: http://www.obitalk.com/forum/index.php?topic=3640.msg58174#msg58174

Here's an oldie but still a goodie reference call when using G-Voice from a Phone: R.I.P Goog411

You could even go a step further and only allow people within your contacts to ring you and with the same as my first post only modify default voicemail greeting under the Voicemail & Text Tab and replace the message with the number not being in service. Make sure call screening under the Calls Tab is Off too.  

Then under Groups and Circles setup a custom voicemail for all contacts.

This may not help if any of your contacts gets a new phone number or calls from somewhere else like an Emergency place.... I'd only use this for two weeks if you got slammed with Spam to hopefully stop some of it. So use with caution.

Really marking junk callers as spam then going in the spam folder and blocking them is the best sure way to cut the crap.

Along with registering your number with Donotcall.gov

Hope this helped answer your questions on G-Voice and Telemarketers.

[Marty.ba.calif.usa]

Thanks for all the info.  Hopefully it will help some people, although it's too late to really help me, I think.

For me, there are a few must-haves, such as telemarketers should never ring my phone even one time, and unexpected numbers from real people should always be allowed to get through.  I still don't know if GV can provide this.

I've managed to achieve this pretty easily with my current plan, for the past year.  I will occasionally get part of a telemarketer recording on voicemail, but it doesn't ring, and I get an email with the recording, and can deal with it or not when I choose.  Usually, I'll see a one or two second message, and just delete it.

I used to get disturbed while either napping or working a lot, and even a single ring is enough to bother me.  My current filtering has worked well, without requiring any maintenance like blacklisting (although that's easy to do).  I do occasionally need to add someone to a whitelist (also easy), so they don't need to listen to prompts to connect and can get right through normally, but this is more for their convenience than an absolute requirement.

I never really used GV very much - never as my main number, but just a forwarding number that I didn't use much, but it was better than more traditional options.  I considered porting my number to them at one time, but was a little afraid to use an unsupported free service that might go away at any time.  Also, I would have had to jump through several hoops to port my landline, since it needed to first be ported to a cell phone provider.