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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

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!
  - gmac 14y ago
    Some of these features sound a little scuzzy to me. Phone number spoofing, thwarting callers' privacy expectations, and pretending to be somewhere you aren't: not so awesome. Still, it's good to see competition emerging in this space.
    - dougiebuckets 14y ago
      Hi gmac, appreciate the note - understand where you're coming from. It's really important to us at TelAPI to expose as many features to developers as possible. Telcos offer all of these features to different businesses and organizations already. Consequently, we want to ensure they're available to every developer as well. There's so much room for innovation in the telephony space, we want to ensure TelAPI facilities it in every way possible. We're really excited to see what you guys come up with!
- Lucky225 14y ago
  Some advanced features would be, for example, if you're needing your API to send a call to a voicemail system, the voicemail system needs the 'forwarded from' header in addition to Caller ID so it knows what mailbox greeting to greet the caller with, whereas calling a voicemail pilot directly would just prompt the caller that a mailbox wasn't found and to try entering the 10 digit phone number. TelAPI solves this with ForwardedFrom optional parameter (see http://www.telapi.com/docs/api/rest/calls/make/ http://www.telapi.com/docs/api/rest/calls/make/)

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!
- gmac 14y ago
  Some of these features sound a little scuzzy to me. Phone number spoofing, thwarting callers' privacy expectations, and pretending to be somewhere you aren't: not so awesome. Still, it's good to see competition emerging in this space.
  - dougiebuckets 14y ago
    Hi gmac, appreciate the note - understand where you're coming from. It's really important to us at TelAPI to expose as many features to developers as possible. Telcos offer all of these features to different businesses and organizations already. Consequently, we want to ensure they're available to every developer as well. There's so much room for innovation in the telephony space, we want to ensure TelAPI facilities it in every way possible. We're really excited to see what you guys come up with!
Lucky225 14y ago
Some advanced features would be, for example, if you're needing your API to send a call to a voicemail system, the voicemail system needs the 'forwarded from' header in addition to Caller ID so it knows what mailbox greeting to greet the caller with, whereas calling a voicemail pilot directly would just prompt the caller that a mailbox wasn't found and to try entering the 10 digit phone number. TelAPI solves this with ForwardedFrom optional parameter (see http://www.telapi.com/docs/api/rest/calls/make/ http://www.telapi.com/docs/api/rest/calls/make/)