Google Home, Phone calls

[The Duke]

I mentioned in another thread that Google Home now does called to phone numbers as long as they are in your contacts.

I was discussing this with my son, he asked how it does it, and was it tapping into my mobile phone, and using it’s sim card. I didnt know the answer, so I turned my phone off, and made a call ‘ok google call son’ and with my phone off it made the call to his number. This amazed me.

I had a google and it says it will call any number or free (including biz) numbers as long as they are in your google contacts.

Next week I’m going to call some business number I know arnt free of my contract phone, to check this out.

However given it will mobiles and house phones for free with out my phone/sim card connected, I can’t see why it won’t work.

My question is HOW is it doing this? And how for free? There seems to be a big opening for abuse too.

[Ed P]

“My question is HOW is it doing this? And how for free? There seems to be a big opening for abuse too.

VOIP?

[The Duke]

Yes, but also no or rather different to other services. It is using voip, but all voip services can only call a physical number of you top up the account. Ie skype for instance needs to have credit on it to call mobiles.

If use skype out, you have to register a ‘physical number’ ie 01….. Then all 01 numbers are free to call and recieve from 01 numbers, but mobile and int calls not.

A good cheat is to register a number with the prefix to the area you are calling. So if you call and receive calls from ant may in the USA, register a number that mimics ant Mays area code, then she can call you for free from her landline. (Also good to do for when your kids go away oit of eu)

However, this new google home calling just treats all outgoing numbers as free calls. So I’m a tad baffled.

I hope this is a precursor to google laumcimg there calling network (forgot its name) here, that they have had in the us for about ten years.

[Dave Rice]

Even VOIP has to hit the POTS at some stage and that isn’t free. It seems Google is sucking up those costs.

Looks like you can set up a Caller ID so that it appears to be you calling the contact.

[The Duke]

Seems like we could rack up some serious phone bills for google.

To get your contact to show up to 3rd parties, you just select your Home device, from within the ‘phone home app’, then give that home device access to your google acconnt. Making sure your google account has your number.

Then you get a message to your phone to verify.iirc. done this last week it the week before. Short memory.

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