I've been a fan of Jott.com voice mail as I've noted before (a couple times). Recently I've been experimenting with Google Voice (gVoice) and found a problem. The key was that gVoice gives you a new phone number and gVoice doesn't work if people call the phone number you already use, in my case my AT&T wireless number.
Jott has a good solution to this where they take over your AT&T voice mail and it automatically hands all voicemail to Jott. It's a shame that gVoice doesn't do the same.
I got to thinking about it and decided I could use the same trick that Jott uses to take over voice mail. Essentially you enter a bunch of crazy numbers into your phone and it forwards your voice mail to Jott so you don't have to fiddle with AT&T voicemail anymore. The problem was that since gVoice fowards calls to my phone, I was scared to forward my phone calls right back to gVoice. Then gVoice gets the forward and forwards it to my phone again, etc., etc.
Using gVoice instead of AT&T Voicemail
Then I was doing some reading and in the gVoice documentation and found that gVoice always directs the caller to gVoice if the phone it forwards to does not answer within 25 seconds. Later I found this handy page on AT&T's forums where someone describes not only how to forward voicemail for AT&T wireless phones to a different voice mail system (like Jott does), it also describes how to set the delay before it forwards. The relevant part of that page is below:
- On your phone, dial *#61# and click Send.
- Some information should be displayed: number that the calls are being forwarded to and the delay before the forwarding engages.
- Write down the number (including +1)
- Dial **61*+1xxxyyyzzzz*11*30# and hit Send. +1xxxyyyzzzz is the number you wrote down previously, 30 is the delay in seconds. The delay can be set in 5 second increments, 30 is maximum
- Dial *#61# to verify that the new settings are active.
So I setup my AT&T wireless number to forward to gVoice after 30 seconds. So if I don't answer for 30 seconds gVoice gets it. If someone calls my gVoice number directly though, gVoice comes into my phone and I have 25 seconds to answer before they are directed to gVoice voice mail (again because gVoice starts at 25 seconds).
In all cases now all of my voice mail can end up in gVoice even if they don't call my gVoice number. Perfect!
Update: This page from AT&T documents how to do the above and more with call forwarding features from your phone. Particularly of interest is the following few points from their instructions:
- Busy Call Forwarding: Dial *67* plus the 10-digit number to which your calls should be forwarded and #. Press Send.
- Call Forwarding No Reply: Dial *61* plus the 10-digit number to which your calls should be forwarded and #. Press Send.
- Call Forwarding Not Reachable: Dial *62* plus the 10-digit number to which your calls should be forwarded and #. Press Send.
So the missing features for gVoice are:
- Forwarding calls to an international number. When I travel to Russia, I have a separate local mobile SIM that I use because of AT&T's outrageous international rates there ($3.99 per minute). However, at this time gVoice doesn't let you forward an incoming call to an international number. Bummer. Please join me in requesting that feature from Google!
