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back to article Google gives Voice to your mobile number

Google now lets you port your existing mobile phone number to Google Voice, the new-age telephony web service that lets you attach a single number to multiple phones and turn your voicemail messages into emails. This means you can now turn your existing mobile phone number into your Google Voice number – the number you can use …

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  1. David Kelly 2

    I knew it!

    Less than 24 hours after porting my number to Ooma after waiting years for Google Voice to come through, Google Voice comes through!

    Well, too late. The minimal features of Ooma' basic service suits me just fine, the whole issue is I didn't want to lose a 25 year old phone number. Now I have the hardware, and a $40 porting fee, from now on at $3.47/mo I'm set.

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  2. K7AAY

    Bummer deal

    Ex-landline numbers don't port, sez GV.

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  3. IR

    Almost

    You can let Google Voice use your existing number already, so I'm guessing the difference here is that you can now use it for the one-number-for-all function, which I don't use anyway.

    It has some pretty amusing voice to text translations for voicemail though.

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  4. Harry

    "attach a single number to multiple phones and turn your voicemail messages into emails."

    Please, somebody do this with geographic numbers too.

    BT did half of it for a while (you had to visit an overloaded BT site to check for messages instead of just reading your emails) but then gave up. And BT's landline competitors mostly just resell exactly what BT offers, so there's absolutely no competition functionality-wise.

    Its annoying that such a service is only available on Voip numbers (and now mobiles) but still not available on landlines.

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    1. ZimboKraut
      Reply Icon
      Grenade

      Well, it's quite simple.... Termination charges...

      Thats most probably the reason... but I found that many things that BT started, they only continued half heartedly....

      I personaly have somehting not far from an agro against them, as they are just as bad in the UK as deutsche telekom in germany....

      there are still too many bureaucrats from ancient times there, who still believe, that they are a government institution, that stands above the law....

      the granade: just blast them....

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  5. Skoorb

    Ribbit!

    BT do still offer it (sort of). Though a company they own, Ribbit.

    See the bottom of http://www.ribbit.co.uk/about/

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  6. Anonymous Coward
    Unhappy

    When for europe?

    I'd love to use it, but every time I try to access GV on my Nexus it still asks me to activate it on the site, and if I go to google.com/voice there is nowhere to activate the service.

    So I assume GV is still US only, or is there some non-obvious way to activate it here?

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  7. Harry

    @skoorb

    Yes, that Ribbit page confirms BT owns it ... but what I don't see anywhere on that site is how I can pay my landline line rental to Ribbit and have unanswered calls on my landline number recorded and forwarded as an email in the same way I could with a Voip number.

    As ZimboKraut hints, a telco receives a termination charge even on landline calls and the cost of sending an email is close to zero -- so though the service itself might do little more than break even, it ought to be viable just as an incentive for switching line rental to a competitor.

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  8. g e
    Stop

    Voice to text

    Nice. They'll store & index your conversations. Maybe even the compressed audio, too, to 'help improve their algorithms'.

    Then USA.gov will subpoena your data. Then your life. Then, if innocent they'll just cut your sentences up and rearrange them into something that DOES make you very guilty of something-or-other.

    OK, *perhaps* not that last bit...

    Come, come, Mr Assange, surely you don't believe we are capable of <insert sinister-ness here>

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