

How To Create a Conference Call in 3 Lines of Code - danielle17
http://www.twilio.com/conferencing

======
_phred
This seems really, incredibly powerful, but I'm having a hard time thinking of
great applications for it. Their examples are very interesting:

<http://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/>

\- Phone menu, where Twilio handles the call and listens to DTMF tones and/or
voice input, then sends the request to my web server, which then responds with
text, audio clips, or prompts for further input.

\- Voicemail transcription, where I initiate a call to my voicemail box
through Twilio, and then use their text-to-speech conversion to transcribe my
voicemails.

... and more. What would you do with an API that replaces PBX programming with
XML exchanges over HTTP?

The best idea I have at the moment is for an online store, where a customer
could enter the number and click to complete their order over the phone. When
they submit their number, the web server records their order number and
contents to pass on to a call center representative.

~~~
justinweiss
We're using Twilio at the moment to provide our paying customers a way of
tracking incoming calls from their customers as part of our analytics package,
and it's working really well for that. It's a neat system, and it's easy to
work with.

------
DrJokepu
I don't want to sound negative but this is getting ridiculous. The article is
about an allegedly easily configurable conference call product, but the title
imples some sort of cool, smart code that programmers would be interested in.
Surely, the code backing the application is not three lines long but more like
measured in tens of thousands.

This is not very different from posting an article with the title "How to
solve the halting problem in one line of code" and then have

    
    
      SuperLibrary.SolveHaltingProblem()
    

as the code. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Twilio is a great product and that
it is very easily configurable or usable, but I think the title is simply
misleading. Sorry for the rant but this is getting more and more epidemic on
HN.

------
tdavis
Cool, working with a company now who is going to use Twilio for some SMS
stuff; the API seems very simple and straight forward. But please fix your
copy:

    
    
        ...and a *ding* somebody people enter and leave.

------
ThinkWriteMute
Whhhhhhhhhhhhy XML? When are people going to realize that XML is quite
possibly the bulkiest way to write data?

[edit] Posting doesn't keep returns or spaces? :(

<http://pastie.org/712151>

~~~
paulbaumgart

      Preface every line with two spaces to preserve
      newlines.

------
eschutte
Thanks for bringing the nice t-shirts to Startup Weekend!

------
Tawheed
These phone systems in the cloud are truly awesome. I wonder what kind of
telecom hardware they are running on....

~~~
wallflower
I'd say it's highly likely they are using open-source Asterisk

<http://www.asterisk.org/>

~~~
nico
A better alternative to Asterisk: FreeSWITCH - www.freeswitch.org

~~~
Shooter
We're slowly migrating most of our PBX/IVR apps from Asterisk to FreeSWITCH. I
agree FreeSWITCH is higher quality code, but unfortunately there is a _much_
smaller developer/support/hardware ecosystem with FreeSWITCH right now.

