Who knew Google Voice numbers were so hard to come by?
7Rather than pay a bunch of money to purchase a PBX and run a voicemail server, we decided to give Google Voice a shot. We're already using Google Apps for Business for email, calendar, and documents so I knew the integration with those features would be nice. We're also looking forward to other neat features like one number that rings all your phones, the hilariously bad voicemail transcriptions, mobile apps, conference numbers, etc...
I wrote up a small set of instructions to help everyone in the company get setup on Google Voice. It included a step that said something like, "now pick a number in the 972 area code" since that's one of three primary area codes in the Dallas area.
After I sent out those instructions I started getting emails back. "I tried to sign up for a new number and it told me there were no 972 numbers available."
What the hell? I just tried this a couple days ago and there were seemingly hundreds of 972 numbers available. What's going on here?
Turns out, Google Voice numbers are hard to come by in certain area codes. But Google tries to ensure their service isn't just a massive land-grab on telephone numbers:
So, what did we do?
Well, we still wanted numbers in the 972 area code, but didn't want to make every employee in the company continue to check Google Voice to see if any numbers have become available. So I wrote a little Node.js script to check Google Voice every hour and report the results to our company Campfire chat room. It ended up being some 10 lines of JavaScript but my boss sure was impressed.
Then again, @snapster is impressed anytime I say "asynchronous message pipeline".
Here's the Gist: https://gist.github.com/freshlogic/7539230
Anyone have any other Google Voice hacks?
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I don't have any hacks for it, but I'm a little surprised it hasn't been integrated into something else by now. Pushing into Hangouts for SMS and the limited access to Voice integration from cell phones (only 2 carriers, TMo just recently) seems like it's kind of a deprecated product. Never mind that the voice transcripts never got any better.
Why not something like Asterisk and SIP phones?
I figure Google Voice eventually gets integrated into wherever Hangouts and Google+ are headed.
We have SIP phones at everyone's desk now and Asterisk would be fine, but it's probably hard to beat all the self-service tools Google provides for free without too much hassle. Let's me focus on building things like this forum system and our upcoming ecommerce experiments.
Added benefit: we can quickly break free from a telecom contract if we want to without too much worrying about phone number portability.
Oh sure, NOW you have time to build a new forum system.
@gatzby: if I could star replies on this forum it would be that one
Why not Twilio?
@erik: Twilio would be a great solution if I needed telephony features for an ecommerce experiment (like sending text message notifications or building a customer service auto attendant)
Right now we just need regular old phone numbers and voicemail for our sourcing team to make business calls.
I snagged a GV number relatively early and managed to get one with a great mnemonic. I told Kath about it. It's been great to teach my kids "our" phone number (whatever that means nowadays), but I don't think their teachers believe them.
mine used to have a good mnemonic. now it's this website I can barely remember anymore. #9668
zoot? wont? xomu? what sites were those?
The new guy's got #2696. Which spells out both the obvious ticker symbol and BOZO
I had to use 10-digits to get the mnemonic I wanted. I convinced myself that people would be hip to 10 digit dialing and area codes would become less of a "thing" sooner rather than later, that people other than me don't remember phone numbers anymore, or that I just wouldn't care if they didn't recognize the area code. Alas, most of my calls go ignored as unrecognized and if they do answer, they invariably ask, "Why, oh why, oh, are you in Ohio?"
Here in San Jose (California) we now have an area code overlay ... meaning if you had a 408 code you got to keep your 408, but now you have to dial all 10 digits regardless of who you call.
When I signed up for google voice in its infancy, I tried to get my nickname so it would be easier to remember. Unfortunately, it was only available in Miami and about a year in I ditched it for a different number. I had 30-40 phone calls a week from people that I didn't know and who also didn't speak English well enough to understand "Wrong number". I decided to stick to the dumb English speaking southerners in these-here-parts and go to the 423 number I now have.
@capguncowboy, What? 423? That's my area code! Don't live there anymore though. Now, in addition to my confusing 423-432 start to my phone number, I also live in a 434 area code, so everyone gets really confused when I give them my number.
if you really want to impress @snapster, get an obi110 and then you can get & make google voice calls on a regular phone.
@capguncowboy - I used to live in Miami. I know your pain. In the time before cell phones, my roommates and I signed up for a BellSouth service that gave us each our own number that rang the same home phone (each with a different ring pattern). We had 3 roommates and 4 numbers, so we thought we were cool with a number for the house, and one for each of us. I even hooked a PC and modem up to act as voice mail that could discern whose call it was via the ring pattern.
Awesome, right? Nope. In reality, everyone we cared about called the home number and our phone just rang (and rang, and rang, and rang) the Identa-Ring patterns constantly. This was also before the days of the Do Not Call registry.
@capguncowboy - Separate story. I kept my 305 number when I moved from Miami (back) to NJ. It's great to be able to keep my number, but my exchange happens to be 609... which is a common area code where I live.
@shawn How long did it take to get the numbers. I've been looking for numbers in 214 and 972. How could I use the solution you created to get one?
I use GV for our personal cell phones, but for my company, I use Grasshopper. It costs, but it's reasonable, easier to connect to than GV (having to remember to log out of all my Google accounts then log back into just the one I can access GV with is a pain!) and as a commercial concern, I worry less that Google will decide one day to abandon the service.
@rowdy268, took us about a week to get a dozen 972 numbers... but mostly because it seems like the numbers are reclaimed around 8pm CT and folks weren't in the office. Also, check on Sundays. For us, a batch of numbers opened up late Sunday night.
If you're able to run the Node.js script you could probably tweak it to send you an email when numbers open up.
nice
How much trouble would it be to create another node.js to check stubhub for tickets that are under face value?
@shawn how do I run the JS so it would look for a number in my area code and email me when one does become available?
You'd do something like this: https://gist.github.com/freshlogic/7875813
@plieu, @shawn
Newbie here, So after opening an account with campfire, where would I paste this code? or where would I run it from ?
@macutan, hmm... maybe I should make real set of instructions if people really wanted to run this thing. In general, it goes something like this...
Note: there's no installer to download for Homebrew, you just paste this in a Terminal:
ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/go/install)"
Install Node.js using Homebrew: brew install node
@shawn, Thank you Shawn for your prompt reply...
Windows guy here... what do suggest I use intead of Hoebrew? I imagine I need an account with camfire? would this script work with their free option?
Thanks a lot for bringing this to non-tech people.
Hoebrew huh? That's something that I could see myself interested in.
ha, hoebrew is quite an unfortunate typo
@macutan, ah, for Windows it's probably easiest to just download and install Node.js from http://nodejs.org
more complicated would be to install something like Chocolatey (http://chocolatey.org) and then install Node.js
@shawn, so after I have that install, I see sort of a terminal cmd promp screen. what's next? where do I put the app.js file that is on github? and how do I execute it? (Thanks a lot for your patience)...
Also, where do i find the 'YOUR www.google.com COOKIE HERE' info and I guess I need to get my API token from my campfire account..
@macutan, boy. hoping you're documenting all the steps for the next guy. it's easy for me to skip over the parts i'm used to doing all day long as part of my job.
save the app.js file to your desktop and then from a command prompt change your working directory to your desktop. then run:
node app.js
yup, did that.. probably having issues with how to get the google cookie text in that code. where do I get it from ?
and yes, will put all of my steps (for a dummy like me) once I get the whole thing to work :)
So in a nutshell this is, so far, the steps I took: 1. Install http://nodejs.org; 2. ran 'cmd'; 3. Install node-campfire;
_4. Install request "npm install -g request"; 5. Install jsontool "npm install -g jsontool"
_6. I modify your code to match my requirements but I cannot find a way (or know at all) how to find my google cookie., can you give me hint
@macutan, I opened the developer tools of Google Chrome, went to voice.google.com and inspected headers. http://cl.ly/image/2u232G0q2m1P