5 ms·

Introducing TelAPI

44 points by dougiebuckets 14y ago

Introducing TelAPI – Today’s Most Feature Rich Telephony API

dougiebuckets 14y ago
Hi everyone, dev evangelist at TelAPI here. If you have questions or thoughts you'd like to share, feel free to let me know - thanks!
- MichaelGG 14y ago
  1. Flat-rate unlimited orig? How many channels then? 2. "Unblock caller ID"? You mean, perform a CNAM lookup on the number? If a caller doesn't send a number, that's sorta that. I'm guessing you're just referring to the flag "hey please don't display the number or lookup a name", right? As far as setting caller-ID, that's great. Do you have a plan to deal with abuse, which is why I imagine Twilio disables it for the masses? (Not that it's hard to do at all, from a technical perspective.) And of course, not available for doing with SMS. Good luck!
  - dougiebuckets 14y ago
    Thanks Michael! With regards to your questions... 1. The flat-rate is $27/mo per channel. TelAPI also offers channel bursting . This ultimately means developers and businesses have on demand access to additional channels for TelAPI numbers with unlimited inbound calls. E.g. You have 1 unlimited inbound number with 10 channels. Then you receive an 11th call. Channel bursting ensures the call can still access the application and won't ring busy. 2) CallID unmasking allows developers and businesses to identify the number and ID of calls received from 'Blocked' and 'Private' numbers to your TelAPI number Our parent company TelTech uses it for one of their products: http://www.trapcall.com/ http://www.trapcall.com/
- josh2600 14y ago
  Hey, What's the underlying infrastructure? :)
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
mingpan 14y ago
I felt a bit misled by the title, personally. Please make it clearer you are promoting your own product.
- dougiebuckets 14y ago
  Hi mingpan, sorry about that. It looks as though a HN moderator changed the headline before I had a chance. Hopefully it's less ambiguous now!
timdorr 14y ago
"No longer must developers and entrepreneurs have a deep understanding of telecommunications systems to build applications that leverage voice and SMS." Kinda makes this sound like you've never heard of Twilio. And given that a lot of your audience has heard of them, it makes you look a little naive. I think a better way to put it (paraphrasing) would be to say TelAPI is the best way to build applications that use voice and SMS. Go on the attack and demonstrate why you're better. Show that implementation with the competition requires more code or certain functionality just isn't possible.
- dougiebuckets 14y ago
  Great comment, appreciate the feedback. We'll keep that in mind and perhaps tweak that statement a bit. We do acknowledge Twilio and respect what they've done so far. Though, we're confident TelAPI's increased set of features are well-suited to satisfy the needs of developers building systems with highly custom telephony requirements. Twilio's solved 80% of the problem. We're out there to solve the remaining 20%.
  - kodablah 14y ago
    Can you expand (here or on the site) on the "increased set of features"? As someone who is currently evaluating systems like Twilio and Plivo, I am having trouble easily distinguishing between them.
    - dougiebuckets 14y ago
      Absolutely. Some of the more notable include: "The ability to set your outbound Caller ID to any number" - This is an attribute in our <Dial> element which allows developers to build systems that initiate calls from the phone number of their choosing. E.g. I can initiate a call to Bob from phone number (555) 555-5555. I.e. it doesn't have to be from my TelAPI number. "Reverse carrier lookups on phone numbers"- TelAPI provides a way to look up the carrier of a phone number via the REST API. "Flat-rate unlimited inbound calling to your TelAPI phone numbers" - For businesses/users racking up the voice mins per month, they can opt to buy an unlimited inbound channel for $27/mo instead of paying min/mo rates. "Voice and audio effects on your phone calls" - These allow developers to modify the pitch and tone of a caller's voice (and basically make their voice sound like anyone they want). We also offer an ambient noise feature to add background noise to calls (e.g. city traffic, poor reception, etc). "Private number Caller ID unblocking" - Upon receiving calls from blocked numbers, users are able to ascertain the callerID. Our parent company TelTech developed an application called TrapCall which takes advantage of this. "Premium transcriptions with human processed dictation Speech recognition" - We offer four different transcription services (varying based on a developer's/business's needs) which allow consumers to record their calls and have the dialogues from the calls captured in text. Thanks for the question!
ewang1 14y ago
Why is there a $0.05/call charge to set the caller ID? This feature is already available on Tropo at no cost.
- dougiebuckets 14y ago
  Hi ewang, thanks for pointing this out. Each telephony API handles pricing a bit differently. For instance, a production US phone number with Tropo is $3/mo whereas with TelAPI it's only $1/mo. A production toll free number with Tropo is $5/mo whereas with TelAPI it's only $2/mo. Consumers in this space have a great deal of feature/pricing autonomy. So when it comes to selecting a telephony API that's right for them, they're well-positioned to identify the best feature/pricing balance. Thanks again for the comment!
brianbreslin 14y ago
awesome! i am friends with Nate, their Miami based guy. Looking forward to seeing how other people integrate their API to their apps.
- dougiebuckets 14y ago
  Nate is definitely a sharp dude. We're lucky he's a part of the team.
runT1ME 14y ago
Ok guys, we really need to standardize a Telco REST api. It seems most people are copying Twilios, but at this point we have Tropo, Twilio, Plivio, TelAPI (Thank you for not having a wierd name at least), my own Open Source server, and whatever extensions are going to get baked into the next Asterisk and FreeSWITCH versions... I believe the community would do itself a great service to agree on at least a few standards....
- johns 14y ago
  That's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoiceXML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoiceXML, though it's not particularly developer friendly, hence why Twilio simplified the model and established and upcoming companies are copying it.
  - aimatt 14y ago
    Yeah, I've used VoiceXML and it is horrid. Definitely made by some Java devs.
- sologoub 14y ago
  That has been tried already. See VoiceXML (http://www.voicexml.org http://www.voicexml.org) and CCXML (http://www.w3.org/TR/ccxml/ http://www.w3.org/TR/ccxml/) The problem with those two standards, is that they are not being followed well, and are also far to granular for most implementations. Twilio was a real breakthrough in terms of getting projects off the ground fast. Tropo and Plivo have also emerged as additional options in that space. The main problem I see with this new API is that there really is no incentive for me to go to them over Twilio, Tropo or Plivo. What Twilio doesn't provide is covered well by Tropo and Plivo. The only interesting thing offered is unlimited inbound per channel, however, if you have SIP, you can get it cheaper from companies like FlowRoute (http://flowroute.com/services/inbound/ http://flowroute.com/services/inbound/) and pay $18 per channel, rather than $27. Compare this with: Twilio - first mover, known reputation, strong funding. Tropo - backed by Voxeo (over a decade in business), offers many enterprise-grade things; Prism (IVR server) is opensource. Plivo - a lot cheaper than everyone else, and offers open source layer for FreeSWITCH.
dbarlett 14y ago
Does anyone know of a comparison chart between Twilio, Tropo, Plivo and TelAPI (and any others I don't know about)?
driverdan 14y ago
When is a company going to have an SMS API with reasonable pricing? $0.01 a message is crazy to me considering how little they actually cost.
vizzah 14y ago
Trying to sign-up, but never received SMS message. I hope it's not for US only mobiles.
- cynix 14y ago
  Same here, the verification SMS never came.
dworin 14y ago
What's the turnaround time for the Gold/Platinum transcription? What's the estimated accuracy for them?
josh2600 14y ago
At 2600hz, we're tremendously excited about voice Apis, but we also see value in core telephony infrastructure. How you interface with the stack is only half the problem, the underlying stack is where we innovate. Everybody has Rest APIs, but not too many companies are working on interfacing with equipment and dealing with core scaling issues (keeping state across the cluster becomes very interesting at scale). This is cool, but as everyone else has noted, this is becoming a crowded space. Can you talk a bit about your underlying infrastructure? Are you guys a Freeswitch shop or did you reinvent the wheel in some capacity? Curious :).
- dougiebuckets 14y ago
  Hey Josh! All very interesting points. TelAPI is built on top of a FreeSWITCH. Can you point me towards some of your work? I'd love to learn more about what you're doing with the underlying stack. Thanks man

44 points by dougiebuckets 14y ago

Introducing TelAPI – Today’s Most Feature Rich Telephony API

Hi everyone, dev evangelist at TelAPI here. If you have questions or thoughts you'd like to share, feel free to let me know - thanks!

MichaelGG 14y ago
1. Flat-rate unlimited orig? How many channels then? 2. "Unblock caller ID"? You mean, perform a CNAM lookup on the number? If a caller doesn't send a number, that's sorta that. I'm guessing you're just referring to the flag "hey please don't display the number or lookup a name", right? As far as setting caller-ID, that's great. Do you have a plan to deal with abuse, which is why I imagine Twilio disables it for the masses? (Not that it's hard to do at all, from a technical perspective.) And of course, not available for doing with SMS. Good luck!
- dougiebuckets 14y ago
  Thanks Michael! With regards to your questions... 1. The flat-rate is $27/mo per channel. TelAPI also offers channel bursting . This ultimately means developers and businesses have on demand access to additional channels for TelAPI numbers with unlimited inbound calls. E.g. You have 1 unlimited inbound number with 10 channels. Then you receive an 11th call. Channel bursting ensures the call can still access the application and won't ring busy. 2) CallID unmasking allows developers and businesses to identify the number and ID of calls received from 'Blocked' and 'Private' numbers to your TelAPI number Our parent company TelTech uses it for one of their products: http://www.trapcall.com/ http://www.trapcall.com/
josh2600 14y ago
Hey, What's the underlying infrastructure? :)

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

mingpan 14y ago

I felt a bit misled by the title, personally. Please make it clearer you are promoting your own product.

dougiebuckets 14y ago
Hi mingpan, sorry about that. It looks as though a HN moderator changed the headline before I had a chance. Hopefully it's less ambiguous now!

timdorr 14y ago

"No longer must developers and entrepreneurs have a deep understanding of telecommunications systems to build applications that leverage voice and SMS." Kinda makes this sound like you've never heard of Twilio. And given that a lot of your audience has heard of them, it makes you look a little naive. I think a better way to put it (paraphrasing) would be to say TelAPI is the best way to build applications that use voice and SMS. Go on the attack and demonstrate why you're better. Show that implementation with the competition requires more code or certain functionality just isn't possible.

dougiebuckets 14y ago
Great comment, appreciate the feedback. We'll keep that in mind and perhaps tweak that statement a bit. We do acknowledge Twilio and respect what they've done so far. Though, we're confident TelAPI's increased set of features are well-suited to satisfy the needs of developers building systems with highly custom telephony requirements. Twilio's solved 80% of the problem. We're out there to solve the remaining 20%.
- kodablah 14y ago
  Can you expand (here or on the site) on the "increased set of features"? As someone who is currently evaluating systems like Twilio and Plivo, I am having trouble easily distinguishing between them.
  - dougiebuckets 14y ago
    Absolutely. Some of the more notable include: "The ability to set your outbound Caller ID to any number" - This is an attribute in our <Dial> element which allows developers to build systems that initiate calls from the phone number of their choosing. E.g. I can initiate a call to Bob from phone number (555) 555-5555. I.e. it doesn't have to be from my TelAPI number. "Reverse carrier lookups on phone numbers"- TelAPI provides a way to look up the carrier of a phone number via the REST API. "Flat-rate unlimited inbound calling to your TelAPI phone numbers" - For businesses/users racking up the voice mins per month, they can opt to buy an unlimited inbound channel for $27/mo instead of paying min/mo rates. "Voice and audio effects on your phone calls" - These allow developers to modify the pitch and tone of a caller's voice (and basically make their voice sound like anyone they want). We also offer an ambient noise feature to add background noise to calls (e.g. city traffic, poor reception, etc). "Private number Caller ID unblocking" - Upon receiving calls from blocked numbers, users are able to ascertain the callerID. Our parent company TelTech developed an application called TrapCall which takes advantage of this. "Premium transcriptions with human processed dictation Speech recognition" - We offer four different transcription services (varying based on a developer's/business's needs) which allow consumers to record their calls and have the dialogues from the calls captured in text. Thanks for the question!

ewang1 14y ago

Why is there a $0.05/call charge to set the caller ID? This feature is already available on Tropo at no cost.

dougiebuckets 14y ago
Hi ewang, thanks for pointing this out. Each telephony API handles pricing a bit differently. For instance, a production US phone number with Tropo is $3/mo whereas with TelAPI it's only $1/mo. A production toll free number with Tropo is $5/mo whereas with TelAPI it's only $2/mo. Consumers in this space have a great deal of feature/pricing autonomy. So when it comes to selecting a telephony API that's right for them, they're well-positioned to identify the best feature/pricing balance. Thanks again for the comment!

brianbreslin 14y ago

awesome! i am friends with Nate, their Miami based guy. Looking forward to seeing how other people integrate their API to their apps.

dougiebuckets 14y ago
Nate is definitely a sharp dude. We're lucky he's a part of the team.

runT1ME 14y ago

Ok guys, we really need to standardize a Telco REST api. It seems most people are copying Twilios, but at this point we have Tropo, Twilio, Plivio, TelAPI (Thank you for not having a wierd name at least), my own Open Source server, and whatever extensions are going to get baked into the next Asterisk and FreeSWITCH versions... I believe the community would do itself a great service to agree on at least a few standards....

johns 14y ago
That's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoiceXML http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VoiceXML, though it's not particularly developer friendly, hence why Twilio simplified the model and established and upcoming companies are copying it.
- aimatt 14y ago
  Yeah, I've used VoiceXML and it is horrid. Definitely made by some Java devs.
sologoub 14y ago
That has been tried already. See VoiceXML (http://www.voicexml.org http://www.voicexml.org) and CCXML (http://www.w3.org/TR/ccxml/ http://www.w3.org/TR/ccxml/) The problem with those two standards, is that they are not being followed well, and are also far to granular for most implementations. Twilio was a real breakthrough in terms of getting projects off the ground fast. Tropo and Plivo have also emerged as additional options in that space. The main problem I see with this new API is that there really is no incentive for me to go to them over Twilio, Tropo or Plivo. What Twilio doesn't provide is covered well by Tropo and Plivo. The only interesting thing offered is unlimited inbound per channel, however, if you have SIP, you can get it cheaper from companies like FlowRoute (http://flowroute.com/services/inbound/ http://flowroute.com/services/inbound/) and pay $18 per channel, rather than $27. Compare this with: Twilio - first mover, known reputation, strong funding. Tropo - backed by Voxeo (over a decade in business), offers many enterprise-grade things; Prism (IVR server) is opensource. Plivo - a lot cheaper than everyone else, and offers open source layer for FreeSWITCH.

dbarlett 14y ago

Does anyone know of a comparison chart between Twilio, Tropo, Plivo and TelAPI (and any others I don't know about)?

driverdan 14y ago

When is a company going to have an SMS API with reasonable pricing? $0.01 a message is crazy to me considering how little they actually cost.

vizzah 14y ago

Trying to sign-up, but never received SMS message. I hope it's not for US only mobiles.

cynix 14y ago
Same here, the verification SMS never came.

dworin 14y ago

What's the turnaround time for the Gold/Platinum transcription? What's the estimated accuracy for them?

josh2600 14y ago

At 2600hz, we're tremendously excited about voice Apis, but we also see value in core telephony infrastructure. How you interface with the stack is only half the problem, the underlying stack is where we innovate. Everybody has Rest APIs, but not too many companies are working on interfacing with equipment and dealing with core scaling issues (keeping state across the cluster becomes very interesting at scale). This is cool, but as everyone else has noted, this is becoming a crowded space. Can you talk a bit about your underlying infrastructure? Are you guys a Freeswitch shop or did you reinvent the wheel in some capacity? Curious :).

dougiebuckets 14y ago
Hey Josh! All very interesting points. TelAPI is built on top of a FreeSWITCH. Can you point me towards some of your work? I'd love to learn more about what you're doing with the underlying stack. Thanks man