How to Make Phone Calls from the Command Line

mahmud · on July 23, 2009

Note to self: next time you're debugging a twilio script, use their free test accounts.

The only thing worse than 2 days of debugging is knowing you have been bleeding cash as well. I had a broken asterisk script rape-dial my toll-free twilio account :-(

Having said that, the service is PERFECT. They nailed every aspect of it down.

dmor · on July 30, 2009

Bummer, sad to hear that happened. Here is a promo code for you (and everyone on that thread) to get $10 in Twilio credit:

HNCLDIAL

To redeem it, log in to your Twilio account and go to: https://www.twilio.com/user/billing/add-funds

Click the "I have a promo code line" and voila!

domodomo · on July 23, 2009

Wow, never heard of Twilio before. Good to know something like this exists. Thank you.

jrockway · on July 23, 2009

Nice. Sometimes I am tempted to reply to the voicemail transcriptions I get from Google Voice, in the hopes that a robotic voice will call the person back and read my message.

dmor · on July 23, 2009

Ha! That would be funny, you could do that with Twilio if you really wanted to.

mahmud · on July 24, 2009

If you're doing this in Common Lisp, cl-who generates perfect XML to feed to twilio :-) I might have a cheesy, one-page cl-twilio package lying around actually :-)

jrockway · on July 24, 2009

Somewhat off-topic now... but I am not a big fan of cl-who; I prefer cxml with the cxml-stp DOM. I started porting my Perl sugar layer over the XML DOM to CL:

http://github.com/jrockway/cl-template-refine

I think I got distracted by something and didn't finish it, though. ;)

tlrobinson · on July 24, 2009

Great way to get geeks to try your service.

(One problem: my MacPorts Perl installation didn't come with URI::Escape. Switching to /usr/bin/perl fixed it)

jhickner · on July 24, 2009

mine didn't either, but you can just:

cpan[1]> install URI::Escape

and you're done.

oomkiller · on July 23, 2009

I like to use Flowroute and write my apps with FreeSWITCH. It allows you to write quite advanced applications that do lots of cool, geeky, useful things.