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Eliminating Robocalls

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Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#201

Post by joecool1029 »

gonehome wrote: post #56
godzillabrennus wrote: post #52

I have had a Google Voice number since it was Grand Central. It has gone on all of my business cards. It's at the bottom of every email. I put it on my website. Google does an amazing, world class, mind blowing, job of filtering out robo calls. I get maybe one a week at most. I get more calls direct to my cell number from random call bots that hit every number with mobile carriers than I do through my Google Voice nu…

I used Google voice for years while Google let it languish in relative obscurity. Eventually after I realized it was silently dropping group messages because they were MMS and Google never worked on supporting MMS (images were dropped too back then) I left it for iOS and iMessage. Getting dropped from group chats meant people thought you were ignoring them and you'd miss invitations. Google had a huge lead with voice…

Oh man you missed the giant shitshow in the past few weeks. Google finally rolled out data calling support on their Android and iOS clients.

Google being Google completely fucked up the UX on inbound call routing. Lets say you enabled data calling to try it out because why not, they actually put something in the changelog other than 'bugs and fixes'. This will immediately break inbound calling and de-select routing calls to your phone numbers over carrier. Then if you reverted the setting to carrier, it just make it so calls went nowhere.

I've had a Google Voice number as my primary for over a decade, it took me a few days to notice none of my calls were ringing inbound. It took me over a day to figure out how to re-enable it, because you couldn't just have the line paired, you had to enable inbound calling in the app to both the phone and the app.

Google still maintains two different panels for Google Voice. This has been the case for a couple years now. Both have different features, anything important like porting and setting up voicemail manually will have to happen through 'legacy Google Voice'. It's insane.

Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#202

Post by joecool1029 »

Causality1 wrote: post #80
gonehome wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used Google voice for years while Google let it languish in relative obscurity. Eventually after I realized it was silently dropping group messages because they were MMS and Google never worked on supporting MMS (images were dropped too back then) I left it for iOS and iMessage. Getting dropped from group chats meant people thought you were ignoring them and you'd miss invitations. Google had a huge lead with voice…

The only Google service I rely on is Gmail, because it's the only Google service I can have a reasonable expectation of still being around in five years.

With the way they keep adding proprietary extensions to it, I wouldn't be so sure if it'll actually support sending email to non-gmail clients in five years.

Google Voice is actually a safer bet as there's no doubt all sorts of legal snares they'd hit if they shut it down. Bandwidth.com runs things behind the scenes and is a competent company to do business with. They'd likely have to spin it off if they wanted to discontinue it.

Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#203

Post by joecool1029 »

fro0116 wrote: post #195
godzillabrennus wrote: post #52

I have had a Google Voice number since it was Grand Central. It has gone on all of my business cards. It's at the bottom of every email. I put it on my website. Google does an amazing, world class, mind blowing, job of filtering out robo calls. I get maybe one a week at most. I get more calls direct to my cell number from random call bots that hit every number with mobile carriers than I do through my Google Voice nu…

I use Google Voice extensively too. The problem I often run into is a bunch of services (like Uber, and one of my credit card companies Synchrony Bank) don't accept Google Voice numbers. What do folks usually do in those cases? Are there services like google voice but don't have the non-acceptance problem?

> Are there services like google voice but don't have the non-acceptance problem?

T-Mobile DIGITS. I got a free line like a year ago, I use it when companies want to be dickbags about not accepting voip number use (because it is still one but shows up as a mobile carrier)

Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#204

Post by lowlevel »

I have resorted to using DND mode as a whitelist. If a caller does not identify with a number in my contacts list, the phone doesn't ring. I feel whitelisting is the only thing that's going to stop the calls... extreme or not.

Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#205

Post by mehrdadn »

godzillabrennus wrote: post #52

I have had a Google Voice number since it was Grand Central. It has gone on all of my business cards. It's at the bottom of every email. I put it on my website. Google does an amazing, world class, mind blowing, job of filtering out robo calls. I get maybe one a week at most. I get more calls direct to my cell number from random call bots that hit every number with mobile carriers than I do through my Google Voice nu…

> Google does an amazing, world class, mind blowing, job of filtering out robo calls. I get maybe one a week at most.

Wait, really? I tried forwarding calls to my Google Voice and it seemed like almost every (though not every) spam call went through without getting flagged as spam.

Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#206

Post by mehrdadn »

joecool1029 wrote: post #203
fro0116 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Google Voice extensively too. The problem I often run into is a bunch of services (like Uber, and one of my credit card companies Synchrony Bank) don't accept Google Voice numbers. What do folks usually do in those cases? Are there services like google voice but don't have the non-acceptance problem?

> Are there services like google voice but don't have the non-acceptance problem? T-Mobile DIGITS. I got a free line like a year ago, I use it when companies want to be dickbags about not accepting voip number use (because it is still one but shows up as a mobile carrier)

What does DIGITS buy you? You still have to hand out your actual number right?

Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#207

Post by mehrdadn »

masonic wrote: post #188
tareqak wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds horrible. I wonder if there is a way to surrender that number to the FBI, so that they could investigate further. Even one call every other day would be too much to report manually for me in terms of effort.

Because "that number" is generally fake. Caller ID became meaningless once VOIP was allowed to spoof it. Can we build a new system atop ANI?

> Because "that number" is generally fake.

I'm not really convinced this is true, because there are numbers that are categorized as robocallers, and there are others that aren't. You'd think that if they were fake then they'd be random/uniform.

Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#208

Post by mehrdadn »

jader201 wrote: post #183

It’s 2019. Why has Apple/Android not added the ability to reject (or at least send directly to voice mail) all calls outside of contacts, and make this the default setting? Seems like this would solve almost all of these problems. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18118664

I have an app that does this but then they just leave voicemail and it's basically the same problem wasting time listening to them and deleting them again.

Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#209

Post by gnicholas »

tomcam wrote: post #53
godzillabrennus wrote: post #52

I have had a Google Voice number since it was Grand Central. It has gone on all of my business cards. It's at the bottom of every email. I put it on my website. Google does an amazing, world class, mind blowing, job of filtering out robo calls. I get maybe one a week at most. I get more calls direct to my cell number from random call bots that hit every number with mobile carriers than I do through my Google Voice nu…

I would LOVE to use my Google Voice number for just this reason. I find the sound quality to be bad no matter what mic I use. If there's a higher tier with better voice quality I can pay for that's fine. My net connection is at least 25Mbps to 65Mbps and I'm in the Seattle area. Do you have any tips on what I can do to get better quality?

This, plus annoying latency. Makes conversations awkward, especially with people I don’t know well.

Re: Eliminating Robocalls

#210

Post by joecool1029 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #206
joecool1029 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are there services like google voice but don't have the non-acceptance problem? T-Mobile DIGITS. I got a free line like a year ago, I use it when companies want to be dickbags about not accepting voip number use (because it is still one but shows up as a mobile carrier)

What does DIGITS buy you? You still have to hand out your actual number right?

It's a VOIP number that shows up as a mobile number.

So no, you don't have to hand out your primary number. You can create a new one there and use that for junk companies.

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