How to Disable Call Screening in Google Voice

Call screening lets you know who’s calling your Google number before you accept the call. It also allows you options on how to handle your calls so that you can choose to accept it, send the caller to voicemail and ListenInTM, or record the call.

There are two ways we screen your callers:

• We’ll show you their Caller ID on your Caller ID display.
• As soon as you pick up your phone, we’ll announce your callers to you. We’ve added this second level of screening (‘audio’ Caller ID), because Caller ID isn’t particularly useful for blocked and unknown names and numbers. Once we announce your caller (for example, ‘Call from Jack Johnson’), we give you four ways to handle the call:
  1. Accept it (press 1)
  2. Send it to voicemail (press 2)
  3. ListenInTM on the voicemail (press 2 and stay on the line)
  4. Accept and record the call (press 1 then 4)

If you turn off this Call Screening, the above mentioned features will not be available.

A lot of people do not like to “press 1″ everytime to accept a call, so the only option is to disable call screening. With call screening (also known as call presentation) turned off, the first phone that picks up will get the call if you have more than one forwarding phones. Keep in mind that if a voicemail system other than Google voicemail picks up the call, any messages left by the caller will not appear in your Google Voice inbox, and instead appear on the voicemail system that picked up the call (i.e. your mobile carrier voicemail, home answering machine, etc.). You can turn off call presentation on a per contact basis in your Contacts list as well.

[vsw id=”f7R8bwfYPus” source=”youtube” width=”700″ height=”500″ autoplay=”no”]