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Ask HN: What are the value demands for products built on Voice API?

• sirchimp 13y ago
  We at VeriClock are using Twilio for our product (employee time tracking - the punch in/out by phone call/SMS component is where Twilio comes in). As far as demand goes, we're seeing very positive uptake of the service. Pretty much everyone has a cell phone these days, so the value proposition to our customer (amongst others) is that there is no need to buy custom time keeping hardware. When we were initially building this out, we evaluated Voxeo, Plum Voice, Twilio, as well as doing it ourselves with Asterisk. Voxeo and Plum Voice both seemed solid, but looked to be targeting a different customer than a startup. Pricing doesn't start becoming reasonable until very high volumes can be committed to. Voxeo had a self hosted version of their product that was quite interesting, requiring a one time upfront cost and then you simply hookup your own VOIP connection. The cost was still going to be prohibitive in our case since we needed a large amount of concurrent capacity to handle a few hours of peak usage during the day. Twilio was very easy to use, and the price was almost on par with the big guy's high volume prices, but without the need to commit to $50k/mo in spending. Those two things combined really made the decision. We were a little worried about the up-time, as the sales effort from the big guys tried to scare us away from Twilio. In the end uptime has been quite good, with only a few minor glitches here and there, usually localized to a specific carrier in a specific region. Plivo was not around at the time. It looks fairly similar to Twilio, but I have not fully evaluated it. Another service that looks promising is Tropo (owned by Voxeo if I'm not mistaken, and running on their platform). Its much closer to Twilio in pricing, and had a pretty nice API as I recall. I would recommend one of those three for a startup - Twilio, Plivo, or Tropo. The price point makes it worth while. If you get traction and have a viable business model, and feel the reliability isn't quite there, you can try another service. But you risk very little money upfront. I would love to hear other opinions on Plivo, Tropo, or other competitors out there.
  • notastartup 13y ago
    That is a very sweet looking product. What inspired you with the idea to create it? How did you validate the idea (I guess it's a no brainer if one works at a tech company) and make sure that you didn't end up building a product nobody wanted? How are you pricing your product including cost? Do you take an average cost from using the API and factor that in or do you charge extra for increased usage separately?
    • sirchimp 13y ago
      My business partner was in the construction industry, and had a direct need for the product at the time. My family is also in the construction industry and when I consulted with them on how their employee time tracking was actually done (paper time sheets filled out bi-weekly) I was somewhat shocked. The toughest part is actually convincing some people that there is a better way and that they will save boatloads of time and money by using us. We based our pricing in part on the cost associated with average usage. Some additional features are billed on a per use basis since the standard deviation from average use for those features is so high.
• GFischer 13y ago
  I tried building a reminder service for the elderly using Twilio for SMS and we were planning on using voice. It failed due to lack of funding and commitment, but Twilio was a great enabler and I would definitely use it again.
• msh 13y ago
  Well, I haven't used plivo and twillo but I have build a lot of voice selfservice products on self hosted solutions. It have mostly been financial information and services (some people apparently like to call a phone number and hear stock prices). It have also been applications where people for example call in to enter their electricity usage. It have been on self hosted solutions but if you ignore the privacy/legal implications the services could have been build on either of these.
  • notastartup 13y ago
    that's pretty cool, does the api let you parse someone entering their electrical usage? Is it secure? The hearing stock info over the phone is pretty cool, do you playback a text to voice?
    • msh 13y ago
      The stock info is purely recorded voice files by a voice actor to secure high quality. The business logic was voiceXML+javascript that parsed the stockinfo that it recieved in json format from a backend and chained together the correct voice files and handled authentication using another webservice call.