The Michigan Telephone blog

This is a followup to my post, Link: SipBri: How to make Google Voice calls from any ATA. What I want to do is show you how to set up a SipBri account, so that you can connect any sip-based VoIP adapter or SIP phone to Google Voice. I am not telling you that you should use this service — I know absolutely nothing about the people behind it. I’m just showing you how I was able to set up an account on this service. I STRONGLY urge you to create a separate Google Mail (Gmail) account that you do NOT use for normal e-mail, and then create your Google Voice account using that Google account. That way, neither SipBri nor anyone else who may gain access to your Google Voice login information will be able to get into your primary e-mail account. I do not make any guarantees at all with regard to either this service or my instructions — use at your own risk!

Note that you do NOT need to get an account with this service if you have an Obihai adapter — the Obihai adapters can connect directly to Google Voice, without using an intermediate account such as this. This is primarily for people using older adapters (such as the Linksys PAP2, or any Sipura adapter), other SIP-based devices, or even possibly a SIP-based PBX that cannot directly connect to Google Voice.

You can click on any of the images below to see them full size.

To start with, go to http://www.sipbri.com/ and click on Create Account:

You should see a screen like this. Fill in the requested information. Note this is NOT asking for your Google Voice account information — that will come later. So do not use the e-mail associated with your Google Voice account here:

Once you have successfully registered, log into your new account:

You should next see a welcome page that looks similar to this one. The first thing to do is click on “SIP Devices”:

Next click on the “Generate SIP Account” button:

Next you should see the following page that will show your SIP account information. These settings (SIP Username, SIP Password, and Sip Proxy Server) are what you would put into a VoIP adapter or other SIP device. Write them down, or copy and paste them into your adapter (more on that in a moment), or into a safe place for storage. Next, assuming you have already set up a Google Voice account, click on “GV Accounts”:

On this screen, enter the e-mail address and password associated with your Google Voice account. Remember what I said above about setting up a separate Google Mail account to use with Google Voice. If you fail to do this and your Gmail account gets hacked, don’t come crying to me:

Now you should see this page, which confirms that your Google Voice account has been added. If you ever want to stop using SipBri remember to come here and delete your Google Voice account using the “Delete account” option:

Remember to go into your Google Voice account and make sure the options there are set correctly. The calls must be sent to “Google Chat” and not to your cell phone or any other number, and there are probably other settings you will need to change as well. Rather than rehash that all again, I will suggest that you see my article, Review of the Obihai OBi110 VoIP device, Part 1: Use your phone with Google Voice for free incoming and outgoing calls. There is a section in that review with the heading, “Setting up a Google Voice account”, that shows you some of the options you should be using and gives you other possibly useful information.

To use your Google Voice account via SipBri, you will need to put your SipBri settings (SIP Username, SIP Password, and Sip Proxy Server) into the appropriate locations in your device. This in not a tutorial for configuring a SIP device, because each one is different. But at a minimum, you will need to place the above information into the proper locations.  For example, here’s where that information would go for Line 1 of a Linksys PAP2:

As for a SIP-based PBX, you can configure your SipBri account as a SIP trunk. Here’s how I did it on a F***PBX-based system. Note that this setup expects a [custom-from-sipbri] context in extensions_custom.conf — more on that in a moment:

The above may or may not work for you. Since you can’t copy and paste the PEER details from the above image, here they are in text form (with user name and password values omitted — be sure to fill those in):

host=sip2.remacservices.net
username=
secret=
type=peer
insecure=invite,port
qualify=yes
context=custom-from-sipbri
disallow=all
allow=ulaw

If you copy the PEER details verbatim, then in /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf, you will need to add the [custom-from-sipbri] context (you can add it at the end of that file):

[custom-from-sipbri]
exten => _X!,1,Noop(Incoming SipBri call for ${EXTEN})
exten => _X!,n,Set(CALLERID(name)=${CUT(CALLERID(name),@,1)})
exten => _X!,n,Wait(1)
exten => _X!,n,Answer
exten => _X!,n,Goto(from-pstn-e164-us,${EXTEN},1)
exten => h,1,Macro(hangupcall,)

The above does three things: Fixes the Caller ID name (removes the “@voice.google.com” part, which is too long for most caller ID displays anyway), answers the call after a one second delay so Google Voice’s voicemail can’t snatch the call back, and jumps to the code that fixes the Google Voice number (strips the +1 from the front). If you want to use Google Voice’s voicemail, then omit these two lines:

exten => _X!,n,Wait(1)
exten => _X!,n,Answer

If you want to leave the +1 on the start of the Caller ID number, then change the Goto target to from-trunk rather than from-pstn-e164-us.

If the above works for you, great.  If it doesn’t, please don’t e-mail me asking for help because my attitude toward F***PBX these days is that the less time I need to look at it, the better.  However, there is an advantage to using SipBri as an Asterisk trunk rather than as a direct connection to a SIP device.  For one thing, it may not be as prone to problems as the Asterisk gtalk channel driver (which is only usable for Google Voice in Asterisk 1.8 and above anyway, whereas earlier versions of Asterisk should be able to connect to SipBri).  But for another thing, when the calls come into F***PBX you can use the CallerID Superfecta module to try to get some form of Caller ID name data, which Google Voice does not provide in any meaningful form.  And, of course, you have access to all the other features of your PBX.

I will note that SipBri apparently doesn’t always accept new registrations — if you try to register and cannot, you may just need to wait and see if they open up new registrations again.  Early this morning they were accepting registrations but I have no idea how long that may last.  If you aren’t permitted to register for some reason, my only suggestion is to check back every few days.