Advanced Digital Phone with Alexa Contacts

[VeteranISPUser]

Apologies, I am sure that this has been asked several times before but I am being changed to DV soon and would like to be prepared.

Currently my Alexa Contacts are synced with my iPhone Contacts which are synced with my Office 365 Contacts.

I should start by saying that I have no interest in “voice dialling”. I prefer to lookup a contact on the phone directory.

So with the Advanced Digital Phone with Alexa:

1. Without doing anything special are the Alexa Contacts available for Caller ID and in the phone’s directory for calling?

2. If not what is required for this scenario? Note a lifetime in data processing I am happy with exporting/importing.

Thanks.

[Andy005]

I don't know about the Alexa aspect but you can import/export contacts to the SH2 as a .vcf file. Once your DV service is active click on your phone number in the SH2 Manager and you'll get the option to import/export.

The obvious question would be if you're already syncing contacts would there be too much information (more than name/number) to import successfully into the SH2.  

[VeteranISPUser · Accepted solution]

This may be of interest to people importing a large number of contacts to Digital Voice on first use.

My prime source for all contacts is Office 365 (Outlook). This automatically syncs to iPhone, Alexa and previously my BT Premium Phone (snapshot because I didn't want my mobile to ring for landline calls).

You can import a vCard (.vcf) directly into the Smart Hub 2 Manager contacts. So the task is to create a .vcf file containing all my contacts (for free).

In preparation I created a temporary Gmail user as that has a free export to vCard. I decided to filter out all contacts with no telephone number (this may not be necessary) just in case SH2 created contacts with no telephone number. However this did cause a few problems (see below).

This is what I did:

1. In Outlook export all contacts to a .csv file.

2. Open that file in Excel (problem, Excel strips the leading zero off all unformatted telephone numbers!) Lucky for me 90% of my telephone numbers are formatted 01234 567890. I have subsequently formatted all my contacts for future snapshots.

3. I sorted my csv file in Excel so all contacts with no telephone numbers were at the bottom. It was then a simple case of deleing them in one go.

4. I then imported the csv file into Gmail contacts having emptied it first.

5. I then exported all the Gmail contacts to a vcf file.

6. I then imported that vcf file into the SH2 contacts. No need to worry about extra data like emails, addresses etc. as they are ignored by the SH2 import routine.

I checked the contacts on the phone and everything was great including those with multiple numbers, home, mobile, work etc. 120 contacts copied.

However as mentioned above my initial load (Excel) had stripped some leading zeros. So I exported from SH2 to a backup vcf file and opened it up in Notepad and added in the missing leading zeros. I wont have to do that again as I have now formatted all my telephone numbers in Outlook. Clear and imported back to SH2.

I would be interested to know if somebody else tries it leaving in the non-telephone contacts avoiding the leading zero strip in Excel.

Edit: I have just discovered that they are not picking up Call ID. At a guess this could be the space (formatted telephone number).

[MandrewCh]

Thanks for that. It's essentially what I  did except you have explained it much more clearly than I succeeded in doing. I had 900 contacts but that was largely as a result of poor housekeeping on my part and I deleted the ones that were surplus to requirements.

I managed to solve the leading 0 problem by formatting the number fields as plain text in Google sheets and using a formula to add the 0 back 

="0"&cellref  then cutting and pasting the formula field back into the cells as values 

I also had to replace international numbers starting with the + sign with 00 instead of + 

On top of that some numbers had a "-" between exchange and number fields but this was easily removed by using find and replace in sheets and I similarly removed all space characters from the number fields 

It's a shame that BT don't provide a help page for this particular activity

[licquorice]

I have asked the mods if they could add links to both of the threads to my DV FAQ post.

[BigDave]

importing contacts into smart hub 2 for the Digital Voice phones is not easy. Not all vcf files are the same.

I exported my contacts from google gmail as a vcf and tried to import it to the smart hub 2 and first of all it wouldn't work but then did but only part of the contacts was imported.

After a lot of effort I managed to get them imported.

The smart hub seems to want a vcf file of records of version 4.0.

The contacts app on my android phone exports contacts as version 2.1 and there is no way to change the versions.

The google contacts file included some photos in the file which the smart hub can't import. To get around this I had to edit the vcf file and remove them.

The record fields for version 2.1 are different and although after removing the photos I was able to import it into the smart hub, the alexa phone was only able to show one contact number for each contact. However the contact numbers were all imported and it was only when I did an export from the hub that I found that all the contact numbers had been labelled in the version 4  file as type none and only the first one for each contact was available on the alexa phone.  I then had to edit the vcf dump from the smart hub to change the number types from none to home, cell or work. I then re-imported the file into the hub and all the contact numbers were now visible - but you can only have one number of each type (home, cell and work) for each contact - so if for instance you set 2 tel numbers as cell, only the first one will be visible.

To any sane person the import facility is almost unworkable and I only persevered as I wouldn't let it beat me.

So in summary:

Edit the vcf file with a text editor to Remove any photos from your vcf file - denoted by a line starting with 

PHOTO;ENCODING

I didn't note down the amount of text associated with the photo but it is a round a page and a half of text and usually seems to be at the end of each contact record so you need to remove until you see 

END:VCARD

which denotes the end of the contact record.

I was then able to import the vcf file into the smart hub - but you can only see one number for each contact on the phone. So export the vcf from the hub and edit it to change 

TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=none:tel:07890123456

 to

TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=cell:tel:07890123456

where  the tel is a mobile, Where it is a landline home number change the none to home and if it is a work number change the none to work.

So if a contact had 3 tel numbers you can have them like this

TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=home:tel:012-345-67890
TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=cell:tel:078-901-23456
TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=work:tel:012-121-12345

You can only have one of each type - well you can have more in the file but only the first one of each type - home, cell and work will be available on the alexa phone.

I hope all this information helps others if you are mad enough to want to import to the digital phone

[Misha1]

Hi @BigDave,

We've just been switched over to DV and I'm struggling!

In our Mac Contacts app, we have quite a few contacts with multiple phone numbers. I exported the contacts in vCard format and imported them into the BT Hub, but only one number for each contact is showing up on the Advanced Digital Phone even if the contact's various phone numbers are of different types (HOME, WORK and CELL). Any thoughts as to why that could be?

Oh, I've just spotted something. In your example, there's a "TEL" at the start of the line and a "tel" just before the phone number:

TEL;VALUE=uri;TYPE=home:tel:012-345-67890

 In our case, the line looks like this:

TEL;type=HOME:01234567890

So (leaving aside the case differences which are, I hope, of no importance), there's a difference in syntax. Hmm.

Another question: Someone else wrote that embedded spaces in phone numbers prevent the Caller ID function from mapping the phone number of an incoming call to a name in the Contacts. Does that apply to hyphens (which you have in your examples) or to parentheses, which I see in some of our phone numbers?

Many thanks!