I had started this project for two reasons: first, I had another project in mind that needed to access Google Voice; but knew of no way to do so; and second, I wanted to provide a way for developers to easily access Google Voice.

My idea was to access Google Voice’s internal API, parse it with lxml and cjson, and keep the results stored in classes specific to the type of data to make utilizing Google Voice in any project a simple thing to do. However, as I was finishing up on a recent change of the conversation class to be Python properties, I decided that it would be fun to do a quick search for “Python Google Voice.” I had never done this before and figured enough time had passed due to a number of things (work, school, an accident I was recently in) that it was possible that something did indeed exist.

How right I was. I found a very nicely coded project on Google Code (originally GitHub, it appears) called PyGoogleVoice. Authored by Justin Quick and Joe McCall, I have emailed them to let them know that I am stepping down on my own version. A lot of the features that they have meet (and even exceed, such as stemming the project to support Asterisk) what I envisioned smsGV (now py-smsGV) behold.

I am still going to work on the project that had inspired me to originally create. Though, instead of using my own library, I have decided it proper to use Justin Quick and Joe McCall’s. It has been more finely tested, is better featured, and will continue to be updated while py-smsGV will not.

Also, for both the benefit of PyGoogleVoice, should they find inspiration, and other developers, I am going to still post my code to GitHub. It’s not as fine-tuned as I would like, it is not representative of my actual skill because certain parts of it are still written in an early ‘testing’ fashion and had yet to be refactored or rewritten and finalized. However, I’m not a very big fan of just destroying code. Knowledge and inspiration can come from many places, possibly including my code, and so I have no problem hesitating to post it, even in its incomplete stage.

This post is just to let everyone know about the other Python Google Voice project in existence and to keep anyone who had been waiting on mine from anticipating or being anxious. I’ll post more about any lessons learned from the coding I had done on this as well as more about the project I had in mind in the (hopefully near, depending on my accident recovery, schooling, and work) future.