REVIEWED: SwissVoice Voice Bridge
Route your landline calls to your smartphone, but only if you’re on iOS and your home’s layout allows
Landlines. Uurgh. Sales calls, voicemails from months ago. Pointless. Almost. There’s always a couple of relatives or friends that always – and only – call you on the landline. SwissVoice wants to bring the wired medium back to life by porting it straight to your smartphone. For travellers, that’s a nifty idea indeed.
Incoming calls
Though it’s mostly aimed at small business owners who need a landline but are never there to answer it, the Voice Bridge is a great way of getting everything into your phone. A tiny base station box that connects to a Wi-Fi home router, the reverse houses a LAN slot and a slot for the phone line, as well as a micro USB slot that provides the power. Hook it up, load the free Voice Bridge app and give it free reign of your contacts, mic and notifications, then it discovers the base station. Up to five smartphones can be connected, as long as they’re all Apple devices. Er …
Outgoings
Once it’s set-up, the Voice Bridge re-routes all calls to your mobile; your smartphone rings when you get a call on your landline, and when you need to make an outgoing call, you can easily chose a contact on your smartphone address book and dial on your landline. It can then send a smartphone a notification with name and number telling you who called the landline while you’re away. It also works as an intercom, letting the up to five users chat together over Wi-Fi.
Restrictions
The world may have gone mobile, but the Voice Bridge only deals with iOS devices, which isn’t much good for half the population. However, our biggest issue is that the Voice Bridge embraces W-Fi only partly. Into the back of the base station must go a LAN cable from a Wi-Fi router, and a phone line. How many homes have both of those things next to each other? In homes with cable broadband there’s zero need for one to be near the other, which leaves the Apple-only Voice Bridge looking rather lonely.