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Thanks to Brett Terpstra I can easily send an SMS through Google Voice in Terminal, but now I want to be able to initiate a phone call via Termainal too.

There is no Google Voice API (yet?) so I know there is no official way to do it, but I'm hoping that perhaps someone else has had this same issue and already found a solution.

A proper solution would have to not only let me say which number I want to call, but also which number Google Voice should use to call me.

(For those unfamiliar with Google Voice, calls are initiated by your phone receiving an incoming call from Google's servers, and then you are connected to the number that you wanted to call.)

I took a look on Github, but the only potential solution I found was https://github.com/tylerhall/google-voice-dialer which hasn't been updated in 2 years, and I'm not sure how to use it.

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  • Google lets us do that through both Google Talk (with a helper app / plug in) as well as directly from their web site to submit an arbitrary phone number to call as well as selecting your phone to call. How good are you at lynx/curl/wget? Perhaps you can fake out http traffic to mimic your web browser and get GV to connect a call....
    – bmike
    Commented Feb 14, 2012 at 0:36
  • @bmike I'm not nearly that good at it, and wonder if it would need something more sophisticated like python or ruby, which I don't know at all.
    – TJ Luoma
    Commented Feb 14, 2012 at 20:53
  • Me neither, but I intend to bounty this up as soon as it clears the new question timeout period.
    – bmike
    Commented Feb 14, 2012 at 20:58
  • @bmike I think the answer from Nils Munch might do, but I have to get WWW/Mechanize.pm installed before I can verify it.
    – TJ Luoma
    Commented Feb 15, 2012 at 21:42
  • The 'googlevoice.pl' script referred to Nils Munch does not work. Scroll down to the end of the comments on that page and you'll see a comment from over a year ago reporting that it was throwing an error. It does not appear to have been updated since.
    – TJ Luoma
    Commented Feb 15, 2012 at 23:55

1 Answer 1

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You can find the google voice command line script Here

With it, you can simply type

./googlevoice.pl call 12345678

To do a call. Other features like SMS and cancelling a call is there as well.

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  • That looks great except that when I try to run it I get Can't locate WWW/Mechanize.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /Library/Perl/5.12/darwin-thread-multi-2level /Library/Perl/5.12 /Network/Library/Perl/5.12/darwin-thread-multi-2level /Network/Library/Perl/5.12 /Library/Perl/Updates/5.12.3 /System/Library/Perl/5.12/darwin-thread-multi-2level /System/Library/Perl/5.12 /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.12/darwin-thread-multi-2level /System/Library/Perl/Extras/5.12 .) at ./googlevoice.pl line 40. BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at ./googlevoice.pl line 40. (I don't know how to install what perl wants :-/
    – TJ Luoma
    Commented Feb 15, 2012 at 21:37
  • Ah, the answer seems to be to run cpan WWW/Mechanize.pm in Terminal. Working on that now.
    – TJ Luoma
    Commented Feb 15, 2012 at 21:44
  • I finally got all of the perl dependencies installed, but now the script exits with 'Link not found at googlevoice.pl line 160' (like 160 is "$mech->follow_link(tag => 'meta');" but that doesn't mean anything to me as I don't speak perl :-/
    – TJ Luoma
    Commented Feb 15, 2012 at 23:42
  • I realize that 4 people have voted up this answer, but googlevoice.pl does not actually work. It has been broken for over a year if you read the comments on the linked page.
    – TJ Luoma
    Commented Feb 17, 2012 at 20:59
  • The script is no longer online (last save on archive.org was in 2012). I would guess it would be very difficult or impossible to write such a script today. Commented Dec 21, 2016 at 20:25

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