Create a Free Business Phone Line on Your Computer with Google Voice and VoxOx
So, I am still in the process of getting all my small business ducks in a row, and have yet to setup a dedicated business phone line. I know that a business phone line is a business expense that I can write off for my taxes, but I haven't seen the need for it quite yet and have been using my personal cell phone. The only problem with this method is that if I do end up on the phone for hours with clients, I end up burning up a ton of my minutes each month. Recently I have been feeling the burn off of these minutes as business has been picking up. Instead of having rollover minutes at the end of the month, I am burning through months of saved minutes. Luckily some cell phone companies allow you to rollover your minutes or I would probably be stuck with some menacing cell phone bills!
I try to plan ahead before any major issues arrive in my small Drupal development business, so I started looking into an inexpensive way to get a dedicated phone line just for doing my business phone calls on. The first thing that popped up was the Magic Jack, which looks like a great deal, but I was looking to save as much as I could , and use technology to it's fullest. I then recalled getting a Google Voice beta invitation. Google Voice allows you to setup a local phone number (when they are available) to give out that rings to any phone numbers you set up to forward it to, even multiple numbers at the same time. This definitely seemed like the number I wanted to go with, as it was free, has it's own voicemail, and can transcribe my voicemails into text. It's not the greatest at the speech-to-text functionality yet, but it's still a great feature to work into this service. Google Voice could one day replace the old teletypewriter for at least incoming calls to hearing impaired.
I continued to search for a better solution and came across a service called Gizmo5. According to the website I found the information on, Gizmo5 allowed you to setup your Google Voice account to receive calls on the Gizmo software application. I quickly hopped over to the Gizmo5 website, and it seems that Google has acquired the company. New signups for Gizmo5 are not being accepted right now, but I did sign up for the mailing list on updates on the new Google release. Perhaps it will be another company Google purchases and just flops with, or perhaps they will be incorporating some of these Gizmo5 features into their Google Talk product instead. It definitely smells like the start to a Google free phone service that gives you a phone number and allows you to call your computer through Google Talk if you ask me.
Seeing that Gizmo5 was not going to be a viable option, at least for now, I went on to seek out some sort of free phone number that I could point my Google Voice phone number to on my computer. I came across a free application called VoxOx. It turns out that VoxOx is the biggest competitor to Skype. Being a diehard Skype user, I never realized VoxOx was out there. Skype obviously has a huge market share in the industry and silences it's competitors to some degree it seems. VoxOx competes with the massive usage of Skype by offering a free phone number* to registered and authenticated users. This is a HUGE feature advantage over Skype, as it charges for their available web phone numbers. This prompted me to install the VoxOx application and test out a theory.
*This free phone number is only offered in large metropolitan areas at the current time, but seems to be expanding. My method of setting up a free business phone line bybasses this issue, as you are using the localized Google Voice phone number as your main phone number.
My theory was that if I were to get this free phone number with VoxOx, possibly I could set this number up as a forwarding number within my Google Voice account. It turns out that my theory was correct! There are a few small issues between the 2 services integrating properly, but only within the configurations of each for the Call Screening settings available for each, which seem to overlap and cause issues if you try to use both at the same time. What I decided to do was use Google's Call Screening features and turning off those features for the VoxOx program. This seemed to give the easiest connection route to a call. Otherwise your caller has to go through 2 sets of hoops to get to you or your voicemail. Also, by leaving the Call Screening to Google, you can get your voicemails in your Google Voice account rather than the VoxOx application. I find this to be a better option as you can setup automated emailing options for your voicemail transcripts and so on with your Google Voice account. The setup beyond that is not very difficult, as you just forward your number to your VoxOx account phone number. I am located in Philadelphia, so I ended up choosing a VoxOx phone number in New York. That was the closest option that I saw.
Overall I think that Google Voice and VoxOx are a pretty strong solution together for a free business phone line to receive business related phone calls. This should cut down my minutes used on business related calls on my cell phone by at least half, as I will try to get my clients to call me in most cases. It takes a little bit of effort setup to get it how you want it, but once you get it setup, you have a free phone line for business calls that normally would cost you at least $15/month for a phone line without long distance. I will continue to update this article as I find better solutions for free business phone lines, but right now Google Voice and VoxOx is a great solution to receive calls for your business for free.
