Replacements for Google Voice with notes on messages?

June 18, 2020 5:18 PM

Google Voice has just announced that "Notes in Voice will be removed soon." Unfortunately, our team at work uses Google Voice messages with notes (in the GV legacy interface) as part of our workflow and have for ten years. Can you recommend a similar service that we can forward our phone number to that will play a recorded answer to callers, record caller messages, transcribe the messages with speech-to-text, and offer a text field for notes to be added to messages? We'd prefer not to roll our own using open source PBX packages and so forth but if you can recommend something that seems easy, go for it.
posted by TurkeyMustard to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

If nothing else works, I know that Outlook can do this somehow. At my school if someone calls my direct line, they get my a prerecorded message and the voicemail is recorded and forwarded to Outlook. It attaches an audio file and transcribes the message. Notes could be done by replying to the email.

Hopefully there’s a more dedicated solution but if nothing else pops up, could look into that.
posted by brook horse at 5:36 PM on June 18, 2020 [1 favorite]

Best answer: brook horse, I doubt it's Outlook that is doing the transcription and emailing. At my employer (a university), it's the in-house phone exchange system (PBX) that receives voicemail and emails it.

OP, you might want to check out Grasshopper, VoiceCloud, and other cloud-based PBX's to see whether they offer what you want. Of course it won't be free.

If having a free system matters, could you set up a new Gmail account for this purpose, have your Google Voice number forward voicemails to that Gmail address, and then leave notes by hitting "Reply" to the voicemail and then changing the recipient address to the new Gmail address. That means you'll basically be sending a reply to yourself, so it will appear in the Gmail thread as part of the same conversation as the original voicemail. I just tried it and it seems to work. It does require that initial step of changing the recipient address.

Actually, it looks like it would work even if you just hit "Reply." Your reply goes to [e-mail], but it looks like that address doesn't even generate an autoresponse, so your "sent" messages appear as notes.
posted by brianogilvie at 8:20 PM on June 18, 2020 [2 favorites]

I am pretty sure the voice mail is actually through Outlook. The voice mail message is set up directly via settings on the Outlook web platform. There's specific options for call answering rules, greetings, voice mail preview (transcription), pin, etc. That said, I went to the settings page just now and it told me my voicemail service has migrated, and I remember hearing something about that a few months ago. So I don't know if that's still something they offer, or if my school changed for some other reason.
posted by brook horse at 5:08 PM on June 19, 2020