[Karunamon]

I signed up with a SIP provider, Anveo, and set up an incoming call flow that’s very close to what Google Voice does - with one change, that being incoming callers who are unknown must press any key to be connected. Robocallers will never do this, humans will, so I’ve got a 100% reject rate on robots.

[etxm]

No familiarity with SIP.

Can it intercept calls to a cell phone with a carrier issued number?

[Karunamon]

Sssssorta. The cool thing is you need no familiarity with the SIP protocol.

What you'd do is port your cell number to the provider, get a new cell number, and then set up a call flow that answers the number, eventually forwarding to your real phone after the caller has a chance to record their name and hit a key.

[x13]

What about returning a call? do you dial your sip number and input the number you want to be connected to?

I think calling folks back from a number different than what they dialed to reach me.. might defeat the purpose. Thanks for sharing your setup.

[Karunamon]

That is an option - the other thing you can do is get a Softphone app on your phone and log into the service with it. They work with text messages as well.

That is the one downside of this is now having two numbers to deal with. I was getting so many garbage calls though, the trade off has been worth it.

[xur17]

Don't you get spam calls directly to your phone now (this is the problem I have with Google Voice)?

[Karunamon]

Yes, but once you've got this "call screening" set up on your formerly primary phone number, you can safely set your phone to discard all calls from people not on your contacts list.

This introduces two ways of working with the service - either you set the service to show "your" phone number as the calling party, and then listen to the name when picking up, or you ignore this and use the softphone app for all calls.

[etxm]

Ah! Good to know. I was curious if I’d have to update all my friends, family, etc with my new number!

I really appreciate the info!