SMS Gateway: Google Voice

This gateway is at end of life-cycle. It was a pretty good solution when it was originally developed in 2009, but that was before there were affordable, reliable virtual SMS options with robust APIs. This gateway does not work very well for new users, and new ones cannot be added in the admin site. Already-installed Google Voice SMS gateways are still available.

Please consider switching to our current SMS gateway, which is very affordable, fast, and reliable. You can try it out for free, just email us at support@nubgames.com. Your Google Voice SMS can be forwarded to your new SMS number so that your guests can continue to use the same number as always to contact you. This forwarding is nearly instantaneous and works very reliably.

Google Voice SMS by itself works fine and combined with e-mail alerts for new messages, it remains a good option for many users that need a free service.

Special Google Voice SMS Gateway Rules

The guest's initial message may take up to five minutes to arrive because the gateway polls for new messages every five minutes. This is a maximum; think of it as a traffic light. Once a conversation is underway, messages speed up.
The gateway will not send repeat identical messages from the same phone number. Make sure your test messages are unique, or delete old messages from inside Google Voice (through the web browser). The gateways uses the combination of phone number and message to determine whether or not a message needs to be delivered.
It is a good idea to regularly delete messages from the Google Voice SMS inbox (note: delete from the SMS label, not the regular inbox). Once a week is probably fine for most services.
Messages from phone numbers that have been assigned contact information within Google Voice will not be sent. The gateway works on screen scraping, and this changes the underlying XML significantly. Don't assign contact information to any numbers you want to work with your gateway.
Offline messages (those sent by guests when your service is offline) will not be delivered to you via chat reliably. It is a good practice to routinely check your Google Voice account manually at the start of each day's service hours and reply to any messages that have arrived since you were last available.

Text messages sent to your GV number will arrive as regular LibraryH3lp chats. If you were offline when the message came in, you'll get it the next time that queue comes online. You reply from within your chat client, and these messages can be transferred just like any other chat in LibraryH3lp. If you're using our webchat client, LibraryH3lp will detect that your guest is coming in on a phone number, and you'll get a character countdown to assist your staff with making shorter replies.

You won't get this countdown by default in other clients, but there are still things you can do. You can train staff to watch for a special queue name for text messages. There is a character count plugin for Pidgin that may be helpful here.

Document URL: https://docs.libraryh3lp.com/sms-gateway-google-voice.html