google voice & iPhone forwarding

05 Aug 2009

So, I got my beta invite to google voice a few weeks ago. It looked pretty slick, but as far as I could tell, it was built around the assumption that you would give out your new google voice number to people to use as your primary number – google voice could then forward it to your cellphone from there. Well, I’ve had the same phone number for like 12 years, so I have no intention of changing.. So I let my google voice account sit around unused.. until now. It occurred to me that I could of course forward my cell phone to google voice. However, on my iPhone, if you go to Settings -> Phone, the “Forwarding” is either on or off.. either it forwards all calls right off the bat or not at all,which is not what I want. I want to get actual calls on my phone but have it forward to google voice if I don’t answer.

Apparently this is possible, it’s just not accessible via the iPhone/AT&T settings interface. I found this handy reference:

Immediate Call Forwarding: Dial *21* plus the 10-digit number to which your calls should be forwarded and #. Press Send.
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, by using *67*, *61*, *62*, I now have all voicemail from my cellphone going right to google voice. Pretty sweet. Downside to this? Voicemail is no longer accessible right from the iPhone voicemail interface. And, although Google Voice will e-mail you a transcript of the VM, it doesn’t email a WAV of the actual message – merely a link to a google.com/voice URL where you can listen to it. Incidentally, for some reason, this link yields a 404 when accessed via my iphone. So, it would appear that actually listening to voicemail on google voice via my iPhone may be a problem with this setup.. Not sure if I can hang with that.. Interesting to toy with, though..