
AnyRoom – A self-hosted, Twilio-based system for temporary conference calls - thenrich99
https://anyroom.io
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LukasRos
I love this because it's a great example of a hybrid world where customizable
open source solutions and commercial hosted SaaS APIs go together hand in
hand.

~~~
Sreyanth
Absolutely. There's one more I just posted
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446337](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446337)

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lima
Jitsi Meet works great for us.

Integrated with the company VOIP system = bliss

Happy to answer questions!

~~~
brunoqc
How does the integration with your VoIP system work?

~~~
lima
The Jigasi daemon connects to our VoIP server and has its own extension. You
can either call a VoIP extension from inside the Jitsi conference, or route an
incoming call to a specific Jitsi conference.

This means that our existing Polycom-based conference room setups can be
bridged with Jitsi Meet with no effort. Our work-from-home people can just
dial the physical conference room from a Jitsi Meet conference.

[https://github.com/jitsi/jigasi](https://github.com/jitsi/jigasi)

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ap46
Appear.in or even something simple built with WebRTC on a heroku dyno or
Firebase for signalling would get the work done for free.

~~~
forvelin
You can use this argument for almost any SaaS and it simply does not make a
sense.

They have competitors but maybe they are better with marketing, fault
tolerance and so forth ? Considering conferencing takes time, free might get
more expensive.

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notum
Too many layers of oxymorons for my taste. Open Source. Twilio. Plans and
pricing.

I'm yet to see a solid, usable and mature FOSS WebRTC implementation, hubl.in
is a good candidate though.

~~~
ju-st
What's your opinion on [https://inthelocus.com/](https://inthelocus.com/) ?
They got screen sharing without plugins. Most WebRTC-ish implementations don't
have this but apparently whitelisting by Mozilla/Google is necessary to do
that, so FOSS is not possible at all for screen sharing?

~~~
gregmac
When I click "Share screen" I get "Screen sharing in Chrome requires
installing and enabling our small extension." which attempts to install their
plugin[1]. This is the same as every other WebRTC screen sharing I've used.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/locus-screen-
shari...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/locus-screen-
sharing/aapfgbkjjhghigopjhenhpgpailijdfd)

~~~
ju-st
Ok, then it only works in Firefox without plugin installation. :/

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iDemonix
The descriptions are slim and there's no screenshots of the product in use,
why would someone click 'Go' on a paid plan after seeing barely any
information?

~~~
tyingq
They don't do a great job of explaining that it's solely "dial up audio
conferencing" via Twilio. Once you have that context, it's more clear.

Though they could bubble up some of the specs/features from Twilio
([https://www.twilio.com/voice/conference](https://www.twilio.com/voice/conference))

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casca
Written in Go, source is here:
[https://github.com/thenrich/rooms](https://github.com/thenrich/rooms)

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Sir_Cmpwn
Nice! I would love to see something similar with support for a landline,
though. Open source telephone infrastructure is an underexplored field.

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upofadown
I am not sure what protocol is being promoted here. If this is based on some
random thing they cooked up themselves then they are part of the problem...

~~~
pedrocr
As far as I can tell these are old school phone-in conference rooms, so
there's no protocol to speak of. You set it up using the system and then call
the conference room from any phone.

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LogicX
Any guidance on the use-case of using this compared to Uberconference?

~~~
tyingq
This is just old fashioned telephone conferencing. Dial a number, enter a
conference code. Uberconference has screen sharing, dial-out vs dial-in, etc.

The open source part of this seems nice, as opposed to figuring it out
yourself with Twilio. They have it all packaged to run on Google App Engine.
Though the timing isn't great now that Twilio supports their own "serverless
hosting" via AWS Lambda. They should probably offer an option to deploy it
that way as well.

This isn't earth shaking to me, but there are companies that still do a fair
amount of plain old telephone conferences, and overpay for it.

~~~
thenrich99
(Creator here)

Yes, this is plain telephone conferencing and the landing page could
definitely do a better job explaining that.

API Gateway + Lambda might still be an upcoming deployment option for this.
App Engine was chosen as the initial deployment target because some of the
additional features that will be added are cheaper / free for low volume usage
when compared to AWS. This already requires Twilio, so releasing this
initially for App Engine seems to resonate better.

~~~
tyingq
I was talking about "Twilio Functions". It's new. It happens to use AWS Lambda
under the covers, but they don't mention that. You don't need an AWS account.

It's this: [https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/05/introducing-twilio-
funct...](https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/05/introducing-twilio-
functions.html)

