The Peek and Google Voice

Warning: Technical explanations below

I recently got invited to Google Voice and have been playing around with the SMS and my Peek. So far, I have been able to hand out one number to friends and family to text me. I don't have to text them first and I'm not limited to 25 people.

Let me give you an overview of how the texting system works with Peek.

When a text is sent out with the Peek, it is processed in the Peek systems, then sent to 3Jam, then sent to the carrier & cell phone. When the text is coming from the cell phone, it follows this line in reverse. As you may or may not know, each Peek is provided with 25 virtual numbers. As you text a number, one of these virtual numbers is attached to that mobile number.

Example:
Peek Text to 2125557000
Text sent to 3Jam
3Jam assigns number 4243541000 to 2125557000
Message on the receiving end shows it came from 4243547000

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Google Voice

Google Voice changes this. It changes this to ONE number, your friends/family can share this number, and you can text Peek-to-Peek. The only limitation is that they have to text your Google Voice number first.

To get started using Google Voice, you'll need to wait for an invitation. You can sign up for and invitation here: https://services.google.com/fb/forms/googlevoiceinvite/

Once you receive your invite, please follow the setup wizard on the site to get started. You do have to enter an existing phone that you use. If you want this for your Peek only, you can choose not forward message to your phone by going to Settings > Phones, and uncheck the phone. Also, go to Settings > Voicemail & SMS, make sure SMS Forwarding is selected to forward SMS messages to your email address.

Great! You're almost ready. Next you'll need to send a text from your Peek to your Google Voice. 3Jam will assign a number to Google Voice. You will see this number come up in Google Voice once the text is received.

Next, have people text your Google Voice number. You only need to give them your Google Voice number. When Google Voice receives the text, it will forward it to your email address. Pay attention to the From field.

In the From field you will see an email address in this format: 12125551234.14243541000.tyldksal1@txt.voice.google.com

Here's the break down:
12125551234 - your Google Voice Number
14243541000 - number the message was sent from. If from a Peek, this number is a number from 3Jam
tyldksal1 - unique ID Google Voice assigned to the number the message came from. Works similar to how 3Jam works for Peek. Only you're not limit to 25 but people, but they have to text your Google Voice first.

Now, to send a reply to them on your Peek you have to type in that entire email address: 12125551234.14243541000.tyldksal1@txt.voice.google.com

Messy right? Thank goodness for an address book.

When you send a message from your Peek in the above manner, the same text-message traveling routine written above applies, however, now after leaving (from Peek device) or before hitting (to Peek device) 3Jam it goes to Google Voice. Google Voice parses that To field apart: Your number, Text number to send SMS too, Google Voice Id assigned to the Text number. The message gets routed to your account (your number), then Google Voice sends the text message out from your account as a text message to the Text number. You can see texts you send from your Peek on Google Voice because of this.

The texting Peek-to-Peek is capable because Google Voice routes the text as a text to the number you specified (along with its ID). On the Peek it will show as a text. When you or the other Peekster receive a text from another Peekster, the text category of the message stops at Google Voice, and then forwards the text to your or the other Peekster's email account as an email message, if they use your Google Voice number only. If they send a text message from their Peek in that messy format, [your google voice number].[your number 3Jam assigned to your voice number].[google voice id assigned to your 3Jam number]@txt.voice.google.com, the message will go to from Device > Peek > 3Jam > Google Voice > 3Jam > Peek > Device (sent as text the whole way). It's a lot of hoops to go through but Peek-to-Peek texting works using Google Voice.

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To summarize:
After setting up Google Voice, go to Settings > Phones, uncheck phone
Next go to Settings > Voicemail & SMS, SMS forwarding - make sure your email address is used for forwarding
This email address should be on your Peek

Text your Google voice number from your Peek - 3Jam will assign a number to this number, Google Voice will assign an Id to this 3Jam number

If you want texts to be sent to your Peek as a text, not through your email box, then people will have to text to your full Google Voice SMS number: [your google voice number].[your number 3Jam assigned].[google voice id assigned to your 3Jam number]@txt.voice.google.com

Give your Google Voice number to people to text to - they have to text you first before you can respond

Reply back to their text on your Peek in this format: [your google voice number].[their number].[google voice id assigned to their number]@txt.voice.google.com - message goes through as text, works for Peek-to-Peek texting

And that's basically it! Last time I checked, Google Voice does not support short numbers (55555). When they do, you to can vote for your favorite American Idol from your Peek!

Enjoy texting on the Peek with Google Voice!

-Ben

Something else I just discovered: it appears the outgoing email from the Peek must be sent from the same email that is linked to Google Voice. I was replying from a Yahoo account instead of the Gmail address that is associated with my Google Voice account, and no texts were sent.

However, even then I am only able to send txt messages to one of the two phones I've been testing with.

Does anyone have any further information? I'll be doing some more testing tomorrow.

-Michael

I've done a bit more testing and it appears this problem goes away when http://mail.google.com is my client. When I send from my peek, my contact info is sent instead of my message.

Found a possible answer, but it doesn't seem to be solving the problem: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/voice/thread?tid=5b5bf400bcbfdca8&hl=en&fid=5b5bf400bcbfdca8000476ef9951d96b

The reason I've drawn this conclusion is that the address works when entered with the correct capitalization and does not work when I do not. The working and nonworking addresses are otherwise identical.

I'm interested in it and have been hoping for a response from Peek about what you've found. Had nothing really useful to add so I hadn't written anything.

Not right now. The peek alters the return email address so that it does not work. I've sent an email to Peek and hope they will be able to fix the problem. They have not replied yet, but I only emailed them today, so patiently watch this thread for further news! I think it should be an easy fix, but I am unsure since I don't know how their software works.

@valzi- works fine for me. Replies to texts (even though i see the capitals have been converted to lowercase) are delivered.

@Ben: yes, but I'd rather not give out phone numbers. Will an edited version with lots of 5's be fine? Here you go: 15555554304.15555550177.WM26hjr85s@txt.voice.google.com

@darkxsun: Okay, I guess there's some other problem. Based on my testing, the answer really seemed to fit. Both of the methods you used (replying and using the saved contact) send an improper text when I use them. For example, if I wrote "Hello," the receiving phone would see "555-555-8283<155555564304.15057968283.9fq_milhv9g@txt.voice.google.com> wrote:". "Hello" is cut out and replaced with that.

@n7ekg

If you're talking about Peek's choice to allocate 25 phone numbers for you, then you're way off topic, but here's the thing:

Phone numbers cost money. They can't just register every phone number on earth and say "okay, when you need another we have 4000 more waiting!!!" It's infeasible.

If you're trying to discuss the topic everyone else is, then you misunderstood. Google Voice doesn't have this limit, everyone sees your texts as coming from your GV number. As far as the email portal, as you know email addresses don't cost like phone numbers do, so Google doesn't have a problem there, they just use that funky authentication system where you have to know the little hash code at the end of the email address to use email to text.

Could I text your Google number and see what I get when you reply? We'd test replies from your cell, from email client, and from Peek and see where it breaks.

We should probably connect via email or AIM or Google Talk so we can chat while testing.

You guys can pop into http://www.thinkpeek.com

It's got a chat room, but no one ever uses it anymore. See ya there!

Darkxsun and I finally found a workaround!

I've been deleting the body of emails when replying to texts. For some reason, Peek does something weird when you reply without the original text in the body which substitutes the information from the "From:" header of the Google Voice email for the text the user types.

Solution: DO NOT delete the text of the email you are replying to. Instead, leave your body messy. If you leave blank rows of space between your text and the text automatically appended by Peek as part of the reply, Google Voice will interpret the blank rows as the end of your text and will not send the extra text.

Am I clear here? Does what I'm saying make sense? It's much easier to see than it is to explain.

I'll expand on this a little bit for you guys.

Only 2k of the email header is actually stored locally on the device. The other 10k is stored on the Peek servers for a total of 12k readable per email message.

When you edit the reply history on the device, you're only editing it on the client side, not the server side as the body is stored on the Peek servers. Thus, any changes you make will not be saved and can potentially result in a blank message being sent.

How about you fine folks at Peek call up the fine folks at Google and work this out?

@foxmajik There's nothing to work out. It works fine. It was a case of us not understanding how it works.

@valzi That's the result of the server bug that they're working on fixing.

I saved the sender in an email from GV sms, and then composed an email to that contact, and no problems. I even tried deleting my signature from the message, and no problem. Everything went through. The only way I could reproduce it was by deleting the entire text OF A REPLY... no problems sending "clean" emails from scratch.

@darkxsun: odd. i'll test again to make sure i'm not confused about that.

@austinm3 We do, and Peek does.

The problem is this: Google Voice texts come from addresses with capitals, and Peek handhelds lowercase them. Not a big problem.

But the server now, in an effort to correct an earlier problem of ignoring changes to To: and CC: on replies, is holding a copy of the original From: field, so when you reply it makes it to that recipient even if you change the To: field because you don't mean to actually reply to them. Peek substitutes the lower-case From:, and in effect you are changing the To: field.

This means, there are 2 copies of the sender in the To: field of the email. One is on the server (capital), and the other in coming from Peek (lowercase). Peek won't let you send a mail without someone in the To: field, and the server won't ignore the one it's holding.

One option is to FWD the email and put in the recipient again. Another option is to start a new email for every text (don't reply), and again, put in the recipient again. These options are facilitated by saving the user in your address book, but it's still not great.

Another option is to delete the address from the To: box, but since the Peek won't let you send it that way, you have to put something else (maybe your own address?). This method sounds crappy.

We're hoping the server is re-fixed soon ;-)

I've been using it for a couple of weeks now, it works great once you get used to composing a new message instead of replying to messages.

Since the Peeks are email devices, all of your messages (email and sms) will arrive as an email. As far as not being able to hit reply to a text message, I can do it and it works fine. I send someone a text, they send me one back, I hit reply and type my message in the body of the email. No need to change anything as far as the message they sent.

Oh, I see what they are saying. I completely forgot about the ones with the bolded "T" on them (those are in fact texts, not emails). I haven't used that in awhile and it slipped my mind. Forget what I said about that. LOL

I can confirm this does work fine. It did send the reply email twice but the original one only once. The recipient had no indication anything odd was occurring. Other than having it archived in my googlevoice account, I really don't see too much benefit. I do enjoy weird, backdoor like 'hacks' such as these though.
PJ

The ideal solution would be for Peek to work out a direct interface with Google so that they can offer Peeksters the option of using the existing 3Jam system, or sending/receiving texts through their GV number.

@tmel :-D yay! I assume this means the underlying issue will be fixed?