

Introducing TelAPI - dougiebuckets
http://www.telapi.com/blog/introducing-telapi-todays-most-feature-rich-telephony-api/
Introducing TelAPI – Today’s Most Feature Rich Telephony API
======
timdorr
"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
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
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
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
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
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!

------
ewang1
Why is there a $0.05/call charge to set the caller ID? This feature is already
available on Tropo at no cost.

~~~
dougiebuckets
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!

------
runT1ME
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....

~~~
sologoub
That has been tried already. See VoiceXML (<http://www.voicexml.org>) and
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/>) 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.

~~~
dougiebuckets
This is awesome! I love seeing comments like this. You obviously know the
space which is great!

I think you'll find that we're approaching telephony from a different
perspective. We're a bootstrapped company of developers building a product for
developers. Our users and our product are what matter most to us (along with
maintaining a sustainable business of course). We love this stuff! We have no
interest in catering to VCs.

How about this, I'll give you $50 in free credits (on top of the initial $25)
and you can hack away with TelAPI and tell us what we're doing wrong and what
we're doing right. We'd love to hear your thoughts.

What do you think?

~~~
sologoub
I'll take it, if the offer still stands. How should I get in touch with you?

~~~
dougiebuckets
Awesome! Tweet me @dougiebuckets

------
dougiebuckets
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
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
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/>

------
josh2600
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
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

------
driverdan
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.

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

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

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

~~~
dougiebuckets
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!

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

~~~
cynix
Same here, the verification SMS never came.

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

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

