I had Google Voice for almost a month now. I was so excited to receive the Google Voice invite, as I had been wanting to get an account ever since GrandCentral days; the company and service that Google purchased and rebranded it into Google Voice.
For those who does not know, Google Voice is a service where Google assigns you an unique USA telephone number. Then whenever you receive a call at your Google Voice number, you can set up the service to ring any (US) telephone numbers you have. It also enables screening and grouping of these callers so that certain individuals can be directed to voice mail or a specific telephone number.
As you may notice from the above, the service is only designed for telephone numbers in the USA. Plus to activate the Google Voice account, a US telephone number must be provided to the Google Voice account as verification (your location). So after I received the Google Voice invitation I had to find someone in the US to validate my Google Voice account. Having done that, I then need to get Google Voice to forward all calls to a US telephone number that I can access outside of USA.
This is where Gizmo5 (aka GizmoProject) comes in. Fortunately, today Gizmo5 announced a new feature where it can connect itself to GoogleVoice for free. Detail instructions on how to set it up are at GizmoVoice.com.
BTW: if you do not have a US telephone number to perform the initial verification of your Google Voice account, you can purchase a CallIn Number service. Since you will only need this CallIn Number for the initial Google Voice verification process, you can purchase the CallIn service for the minimum 3 months.
After you have verified your Google Voice account, you can proceed to hook up Google Voice and Gizmo5. Don’t forget to click on Save.
If you did not use Gizmo5 to verify your Google Voice account, you can enter your Gizmo5 SIP telephone number into your Google Voice as one of the telephone numbers to forward to.
If you like, you can download a copy of the Gizmo5 desktop application to use as your VoIP client. But if you are like most and use Skype as your VoIP client/service, you can use Gizmo5’s built in feature to forward all calls to your Skype account.
You are now all set. Any calls to your Google Voice account will be forwarded to your Skype account. If you have an iPhone you can answer these incoming calls there too with the Skype iPhone native application.
I hope in the future Google will open Google Voice to telephone numbers outside of the United States.
I have google voice also, but really see zero point in it unless you live in the USA.
I believe the thing about Google Voice is that it will provide a permanent number for you from Google. The slight advantage of the latter is that it may last longer than other SIP service.Yes, agree that currently with the described convoluted method of redirecting the Google Voice incoming calls make it less useful for the time being, but still useful never the less.