Setting up Mautrix Google Voice bridging (optional)

^{Refer the common guide for configuring mautrix bridges: Setting up a Generic Mautrix Bridge}

The playbook can install and configure mautrix-gvoice for you, for bridging to Google Voice.

See the project's documentation to learn what it does and why it might be useful to you.

Prerequisite (optional)

Enable Appservice Double Puppet

If you want to set up Double Puppeting (hint: you most likely do) for this bridge automatically, you need to have enabled Appservice Double Puppet for this playbook.

See this section on the common guide for configuring mautrix bridges for details about setting up Double Puppeting.

Adjusting the playbook configuration

To enable the bridge, add the following configuration to your inventory/host_vars/matrix.example.com/vars.yml file:

matrix_mautrix_gvoice_enabled: true

Extending the configuration

There are some additional things you may wish to configure about the bridge.

See this section on the common guide for configuring mautrix bridges for details about variables that you can customize and the bridge's default configuration, including bridge permissions, encryption support, bot's username, etc.

Installing

After configuring the playbook, run it with playbook tags as below:

ansible-playbook -i inventory/hosts setup.yml --tags=setup-all,start

The shortcut commands with the just program are also available: just install-all or just setup-all

just install-all is useful for maintaining your setup quickly (2x-5x faster than just setup-all) when its components remain unchanged. If you adjust your vars.yml to remove other components, you'd need to run just setup-all, or these components will still remain installed. Note these shortcuts run the ensure-matrix-users-created tag too.

Usage

To use the bridge, start a chat with @gvoicebot:example.com (where example.com is your base domain, not the matrix. domain).

Google Voice has no phone to pair and no QR code to scan. It logs in with cookies, which you copy from a browser already signed in to voice.google.com and hand to the bot. It is fiddlier than scanning a code and feels more suspicious than it is, but Google leaves no cleaner door open. The bridge's official Authentication guide has the exact cookies to grab and the steps for grabbing them.

Those cookies are a login session, and Google expires them on its own schedule. When they lapse the bridge goes quiet and you log in again. Nothing is broken, that is just how cookie auth ages.

Once you log in, the bridge builds portal rooms for your recent conversations and carries text and media both ways. Don't reach for it to start a brand-new chat or to place a call, though. That ground still belongs to Google Voice, so keep the app around for those.

Troubleshooting

As with all other services, you can find the logs in systemd-journald by logging in to the server with SSH and running journalctl -fu matrix-mautrix-gvoice.

Increase logging verbosity

The default logging level for this component is warn. If you want to increase the verbosity, add the following configuration to your vars.yml file and re-run the playbook:

# Valid values: fatal, error, warn, info, debug, trace
matrix_mautrix_gvoice_logging_level: 'debug'

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