

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

What sort of apps are being built on Voice APIs like Plivo and Twilio?<p>What kind of demand is there for software built using such APIs?<p>Plivo, Twilio, which is better for building a product on top of a Voice API?
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sirchimp
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
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
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.

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msh
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
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
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.

------
GFischer
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.

