fuck these guys
I use it as my primary phone number so that nobody has my real one.
Ah, so that you can easily replace it if it ends up on some spam list?
it is useful for that, but I started it as a layer against sim swapping
Voice, YouTube, & occassionally Translate (sorry, your FOSS option doesn’t cover non-European languages well) are the Google servers I can’t quite shake. I almost never use the Voice account but when I do, it’s some required voice call from a US number for a bank or similar—which is very important, to make these calls, but it is so infrequent that I can’t justify paying for an entire service for 1–2 (usually very long) calls annually.
See voip.ms for voice. I can't speak for specific non-European languages, but I've been quite happy with LibreTranslate for my on the fly needs. Setup was dead easy too. (And if you see a lack of coverage for particular languages, obviously your contributions to improve that would be welcome)
Well I live, operate, & travel around Asia so English is the only European language to know—which I don’t need help with. I use Yandex Translate primarily just to partition my data usage between servers (image search is the only other thing I use Yandex for), but its offerings aren’t quite as broad for languages like Lao & the quality of translations is slightly worse. All of the European languages are basically the same if you squint your ears so it is no surprise the FOSS tools can handle something easy, but Western-centrism in tech isn’t a new thing.
Seconding @Tazerface@sh.itjust.works 's suggestion of voip.ms.
I throw them a lil cash maybe once per quarter or so, they maintain a bunch of numbers that I may or may not utilize at any moment, but are just too good to give up, and anything I'm not actively using is set up to send inbound SMS to my email - that way I don't lose access to multi-factor codes and such, but I'm not trying to juggle a bunch of numbers in some app or other either.
Dirt cheap, 'just works,' and they even made porting from GV easy.
Also, by the same token, to de-google your email, I'm a big fan of Migadu. Same sort of scenario - I prepay a lil bit once a quarter or so, have catch-alls set up so I don't miss random crap from emails I've forgotten I created/used a decade ago, etc. A nice, simple solution that also plays well with on-the-fly outbound email addressing, Thunderbird for day to day needs, and webmail.
