EDIT (2018): This article is extremely out-of-date and in no way useful today, and will probably be removed from this site at some point in the future. You might find this article more useful: How to use Google Voice with FreePBX and Asterisk without using XMPP or buying new hardware.
For those of you using Asterisk, Bill over at the PSU VoIP blog has come up with a way to interface Asterisk with Google Voice, by co-installing FreeSWITCH (which also supports Google Voice). Turns out that Asterisk and FreeSWITCH can co-exist on the same server, though you do have to change the configuration a bit so they don’t compete for the same ports. Anyway, Bill has come up with a how-to on adding Google Voice integration to current versions of Asterisk, so if that interests you, head on over and have a look:
Using FreeSWITCH to add Google Voice to Asterisk
The bonus is that once you get FreeSWITCH installed you can play around with it and look at some of its other features, if you are so inclined. Of course, the Asterisk folks could backport the Google Voice support to previous versions and make it unnecessary to do things like this, but I’m not holding my breath.
EDIT (January 26, 2012): The Google Voice channel drivers in Asterisk 1.8 have become unreliable enough (in my personal opinion, anyway) that I just used the technique shown in this article, and I must say that it works a LOT better than Asterisk 1.8’s Google Voice support. I also added some comments to that article (probably too many!) that among other things show how I got it working for multiple Google Voice accounts. So I would now recommend using this method to bridge Asterisk to Google Voice in preference to using Asterisk 1.8’s native channel drivers (unless you are very short on memory and/or storage space) — it just works, and calls connect faster. Read the article AND the comments under it first, so you’ll know what to expect, and do be aware that it takes a relatively LONG time to compile and install FreeSWITCH (compared to Asterisk). At points during the installation it may look like it’s stuck in an endless loop, but it really isn’t. Just go away and take a walk outside or something, and come back in a while and it should be done.
Related articles
- I no longer recommend using Asterisk’s Google Voice support – try these methods instead! (tech.iprock.com)
- Using YATE to overcome Google Voice issues in FreeSWITCH and Asterisk (tech.iprock.com)
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