Hi all,
I've played a lot with Twilio over the last few months and have been very
pleasantly surprised at how easy to use it is. We're talking 5 minutes to
knock up a bit of PHP which can handle calls, set up a conference call,
play back an MP3 to the caller, etc. You could build a fairly complex
call-handling system within an hour.
It can do things like forwarding calls - though it won't change the
originating number (i.e. if you call your Twilio number and it forwards the
call to another number, the final destination will see your originating
number, not the Twilio one.) It has great SMS handling too.
However, I'm sure it's not hard to break some sort of privacy law with it
if you're not careful, since it will just do what you ask in most cases.
It's cheap too - $1 per month per landline number ($2 for 0800), plus 1c
per minute/text (6c for 0800 I think). I even managed to get a very nice
number (ending 00000).
I suspect it may not be the best such system though - at hack days I've
seen people using Tropo - https://www.tropo.com/ - which also features
things like automatic speech recognition...
Taras
On 30 September 2013 12:29, Mia <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> On 30 September 2013 10:05, Mike Ellis <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > I'm pretty sure you'd still have to say "costs the same as a normal SMS
> message" but given that almost everyone has free texts as part of their
> mobile plan, that becomes less of a problem too.
>
> Unless you're on Pay As You Go or roaming... (Someone had to say it!)
>
> > Final thing that got me excited about the tech is that it can be set to
> transcribe incoming voice too. So in theory you could get users to phone a
> freephone number to leave a review / talk about their memories of an object
> - and the system would then send you through a text version of that which
> you could moderate / edit before displaying on your website / kiosk etc.
>
> I have a feeling that Fiona Romeo did something like this with Skype
> voicemail at the Maritime Museum, I'm not sure if it's been written up
> anywhere.
>
> Years ago I wrote an SMS-to-forum post gateway for a nightclub to
> display messages from punters; even then the APIs made it pretty
> simple to do interesting things with texts. The tech has potential but
> as always it's whether it fits in with what both audiences and
> organisations want to do. 'Bring your own device' was identified as a
> 'technology to watch' for the 2013 Horizon.Museum report
> (http://www.nmc.org/news/submit-your-projects-2013-horizonmuseum-report)
> so we might see more projects exploring this space soon.
>
> Cheers, Mia
>
> --------------------------------------------
> http://openobjects.org.uk/
> http://twitter.com/mia_out
> I mostly use this address for list mail and don't check it daily; use
> my open.ac.uk address for personal email
>
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