send SMS and frontline forms/data through Google Voice

[Joel Mitchell]

I have a google voice account, which allows me to send free SMS (anywhere in the world), so I want to use this as my server account, but it is not connected to a physical phone, so I am not sure how I can connect it to my FrontlineSMS applications. Any ideas on how to use this? I should be able to set it up as a new SMS Internet Service provider along the lines of clickatell or intellisms, but obviously those are paying apps, and it should be free through google voice. thanks!

[kiwanja]

Hi Joel

A few people have asked us about this. I don't believe there is a Google Voice API which allows external applications to access the free SMS service (if they did this then I'm guessing they would be inundated with texts being sent). FrontlineSMS can be extended to make use of additional aggregators beyond the two we currently support - Clickatell and IntelliSMS - but they need to provide APIs (and you'll need to do some coding work in FrontlineSMS to connect them).

If you find evidence of an SMS API for Google Voice then please let us know. It would make a lot of sense building support if this were the case!

Ken

[Jack]

Check out the python API at: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=2ccc5a8fa43f... and http://github.com/justquick/python-googlevoice

[Alex Anderson]

Thanks Jack :-) I think this post was quite old, but there's definitely a Java API now.

I had a play around getting Google Voice integrated with FrontlineSMS. Unfortunately I'm based in the UK, so I can't get a Voice account, but if someone familiar with Java wants to finish it off I can share the code.

It's worth pointing out that (AFAIK) Voice won't let you send SMS outside the US, and probably won't let you send Forms messages either.

Alex

[Joel Mitchell]

I have a GV account in the UK (you can set it up through a SIP client), and they have at various points allowed international SMS (which was why I had posted this last autumn), though it does look like they have stopped allowing it. I would still find it useful though, as I could probably manage to use it internationally by getting the phones I need hooked up with GV numbers. Let me know what thoughts you have on taking this forward.
cheers,
Joel

[Alex Anderson]

Do you think I could get a Google Voice account in this way? Would you be able to help develop the GoogleVoice adapter for FrontlineSMS?

[Joel Mitchell]

To get an actual GV account you have to get an invite, and I haven't got any left, but if you can get the invite, setting it up through a sip client is pretty simple... I would definitely be up for working on that, though I am quite busy over the next 3 weeks.

[Alex Anderson]

Shame about the invites!

There's a JSON API for sending and receiving SMS, and we've got outline code for doing this from Java, but we'll need someone to finish off the code and make sure it actually works. Is that something you could do?

[Joel Mitchell]

I can take a look, but I'm afraid I'll be too busy to give it much time now. Will see who I know that has a bit more time at the moment... where is that API?

[Alex Anderson]

You can get hold of the code on GitHub. There's a couple of projects you'll need, and there'll need to be some modifications to update it to the latest version of FrontlineSMS.

http://github.com/alxndrsn/frontlinesms-googlevoice
http://github.com/alxndrsn/google-voice-java

If we get into more technical discussion, could we move it to the developers mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/frontlinesms-developers or the IRC channel #FrontlineSMS on freenode.net?

[Jack]

In the U.S. at least, Google has removed the invite step for Google Voice - it's freely available to everyone.

[Alex Anderson]

For the record:

"Google Voice is not available...for users outside the US..."

:-(

[Mathias Lin]

You can just use a vpn (i.e. I use astrill.com), set the server to US and you can sign up for Google Voice. I did the same for Voice and also Google Music Beta.