Ooma Forums

Currently, if Multi-Ring is enabled, you must press a '1' before the call will be connected. I'd like this to be an option, not a requirement. When going hands free and in the car for example, it's sometimes difficult to get to my phone after I pick it up and to be honest, If I didn't want to talk to the person, I wouldn't have picked up the phone in the first place.

TRaymond

I used to think it was odd to have to press 1. I really didn't use call forwarding anyway but it seemed useless to press a number when you pick up. However, my recent experience with google voice showed me why they do this.

Google voice has a similar multi ring and you press 1 the same way. Thinking this to be useless, I disabled it, which google voice does allow you to do. The next day, the phone at work rang a single ring. I picked it up but noone was there. Two more times it rang but upon picking it up, noone was there. Later that evening at home, my wife said she called but didn't get connected. I assumed google voice, being a new service, just messed up. It wasn't until two days later when I figured out what really happened. Checking my office voice mail, I heard a small piece of a message from the google voice announcement. Apparently my office voice mail picked up the call before I answered. I don't know exactly how this works since I picked it up on the first ring on my work phone (I have a different 'office' and 'work area' at work), but somehow my office voice mail picked it up.

Hitting the 1 does have a purpose other than letting you choose to answer the phone or not. It stops alternate voicemails from picking up since the machines would never hit the 1. Out of the phones I use, I have ability to shut off a surprisingly small number of the voicemails. I can't turn off either of my two work phone #s. I could potentially call the cell phone company and have that one disabled but it just comes standard with the plan.

Aside from voice mails, it also gives the opportunity for shared phones (i.e. if it rings at the house & my wife answers when it's for me) to not be picked up and continue to ring your other lines.

Anyway, it seems like it should be simple enough to have this as a option rather than mandatory but I'm guessing that it's actually fairly rare if you are using multi ring to forward to multiple numbers that you'd be better off turning it off. Of course, with ooma you technically call forward via multi ring and there it would seem turning this off would work effectively.

This is a popular feature request and there are quite a few discussions about it:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=si ... sgOYsr3HDQ

You bring up a good point about other voicemail systems picking up the call. And to expand on why Ooma may not want to do that - if your office voicemail answers the call, Ooma has to pay a call termination fee, whereas if Ooma voicemail answers the call, there is no fee.

What if Ooma used voice recognition and responded - "Press 1 or say 'yes' to accept this call"? Seems that would work for hands free cell phone operation.

bw1 wrote: What if Ooma used voice recognition and responded - "Press 1 or say 'yes' to accept this call"? Seems that would work for hands free cell phone operation.

Now that sounds like you've hit on something that would work.
Tom

Pressing 1 is a real pain. I forward to my Iphone, when the phone rings 1: I have to turn on the phone
2: I have to press the key pad icon
3: I have to press 1

by the time I go through this performance, the caller has hung up. It never used to be like this for multi ring. I thought that this was for call forwarding only.

melvyn wrote:It never used to be like this for multi ring. I thought that this was for call forwarding only.

It's always been like that -
http://forums.ooma.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=224

bw1 wrote: What if Ooma used voice recognition and responded - "Press 1 or say 'yes' to accept this call"? Seems that would work for hands free cell phone operation.

Now that is one of the best solutions I've heard to date. But not just for ooma, how about for Google Voice as well? I've been using it as a front end for my cell and ooma - it would be great to have it use voice recognition. Since we'll soon have Premier Extensions for Google Voice it would be a perfect solution!