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Ask HN: Alternatives to (Enshittified) Google Voice?

by fghorow on 11/5/23, 11:32 PM with 1 comments

I've been using Google Voice for holding on to my phone numbers for more than a decade, even though the actual phone service has been with many carriers with unmemorable numbers.

Google Voice has dropped way too many calls for me of late to be tolerable. I'm hence moving "my number" to an actual carrier service, but that still leaves me locked-in enough to be painful when I need to change carriers (because of their own enshittification).

What do others do? (SIP service? Something else?)

  • by justinludwig on 11/6/23, 2:48 AM

    Set up an Asterisk box and connect it to a SIP trunking service (like Twilio or a bunch of other similar providers) to make and receive regular phone calls. Use the same provider to separately send and receive text messages (via the provider's web API). With a little elbow grease, you can replicate all the features of Google Voice using that (plus have a lot more possibilities for customization and automation).

    The downside is that while you can get a basic set-up done over a weekend, it will probably take you much longer to actually get everything set up to your liking (and you'll probably need to do a lot of background reading and research just to figure out what you want to set up, how it all fits together, etc).