Earlier this year, I wrote a blog about google voice, you can find more details about it here.
As a recap, google voice is a service provided by google that provides one US phone number free of charge to each user account. The user can link their existing phone number to their free Google voice account so that the linked phone number will ring when their google voice number is called. At the end of my last blog, I talked about the Google Voice API for developers. With this API, you can initiate a call programmatically and even specify which linked phone you want to call.
Today I will show you how I use this API to have my mom in china to call me anytime. First, let me explain my issue, I am living in the US and my mom is living in China. When I make a call from US to my mom in china, the rate is 1 cent per minute. Pretty cheap, right? However, if my mom makes a call to me from china, she has to pay 30 cents per minute. Normally I will call my mom to save the money. Can my mom call me paying only 1 cent per minute? With google voice, yes she can!
For this I always initiate the call from the US to china using google voice API, the only thing I need is a place my mom can access and initiate the call. As a developer, this is easy, I create a single webpage and host it on my personal web server. From there I have my mom bookmark the address on her cell phone. On the page is a simple button that says “Call My Son”. Every time my mom wants to call me, she just needs to open the page on her cell phone and click the button “Call My Son”. The code behind will initiate a call from my google voice number to my mom’s phone in china. Since I linked my cell phone number to my google voice number already, my cell phone number will ring. Becuase the call is initiated within the US, the rate will be 1 cent per minute. Pretty cool, right? In my next blog, I will show you the simple code that implements this.
Here at Palm Beach Software Design, we take pride in being able to find different solutions for your needs by working with the latest technologies. We take the time to determine the best implementation based on your business needs, we strive to create custom software for our customers that will increase profits and productivity.
