SMS using Prowl and Google Voice

by Christopher Flynn — Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Google Voice is currently invite only but you can apply for an invite and hopefully it shouldn't take long to get in. There are a lot of features in google voice but I am going to focus on getting SMS messages pushed to your phone using prowl.

Now using google voice you can push your SMS messages to your phone but that would still incur an SMS charge. You can disable forwarding SMS to your phone and use the web interface to send/receive SMS messages but you don't get notified when you get a message, that's where Prowl comes in.

In order to get this to work, you'll need a computer that's on 24/7. If you have a webserver or a PVR (say running Mythtv) you can use that. I have access to a few computers that are on 24/7 so this wasn't a problem for me. To check for messages and to send notifications to Prowl, we will use googlevoicenotify. In order to get this to work you will probably need to install a few dependencies. Simplejson, BeautifulSoup, prowl.py and use at least python 2.5.

The README file has the description on how to use it but basically you can put your prowl API key in the file ~/.prowlapi and optionally put your google voice username and password in ~/.gvnotify like so:
gvid=yourusername
password=yourpassword
Then just run the command python prowlgooglevoice.py. If you don't create the ~/.gvnotify file it will ask you for your username and password. It will then check every 60 seconds for an SMS message and if it finds one, it will send it to prowl which will push the notification to your phone. You can then go to the web interface to reply to your SMS message.

The downside to this approach is that you need to have a computer running 24/7 and you need to use google voice. If you are using google voice already and have a computer running 24/7 then this is a great way to save some money by not having a SMS plan or getting charged per message.