The Background

I’ve used Talkatone to make free calls for years now. I liked it so much that I forwarded my normal number to Google voice and use it for all of my personal calls. So we decided it would also be good for my wife to use talkatone and Google voice in lieu of A $40-$80 cell phone bill. So we set her up with the Google account and upgraded it to use Google voice. Then we plugged it into her new LTE Nexus 7.

The Problem(s)

When we went to make calls it would go to the dialing screen for one or two seconds and then would come back to the dialer. When we would call the number it wouldn’t ring on Talkatone.

The Solution

What we had discovered was that Google chat had been replaced with Google hangouts and in order for Talkatone to work it needed to forward to Google chat under the phones tab in Google voice’s settings. Luckily Google still had a way to go back to the old chat. You could find this option within Gmail on the left hand sidebar. Once we enabled the old chat we could login to Google voice, go to settings, and set up all of the calls to forward to Google chat.

So Talkatone must interact with the Google chat API and so if it isn’t using the old API or old service it won’t work properly. Hopefully Google updates the Google hangouts so that applications like Talkatone will still function properly. Otherwise A lot of people who get to make free calls are going to be disappointed.