Telephony as a Service – Twilio

With Twilio  now offering full UK telephony support*, I spent part of my day off today exploring their platform – and I’ve got to say, I’m thoroughly impressed.

With $30 credit on signing up, and $50 extra credit thanks to meeting the UK Twilio team at the jQuery UK  conference in Oxford last week – that left me with $80 of credit on a platform that is very reasonably priced.

So far I’ve got the following working:

– programmatical SMS message distribution

– programmatical SMS auto response

– simple IVR (interactive voice response)

– voicemail transcription -> email (transcription accuracy was not that great)

– and my personal favourites, outgoing browser based calls to landlines/mobiles

After a lot of experimenting, and some extended calls from my account out to mobile phone for voice tests, I only managed to spend $4.50 (including the $1 to rent a UK number  for the month).

So much potential and so many applications, I’m looking forward to getting a little more time for further exploration soon.

• I was looking into some Telephony services for a pet project last year, and while Twilio were not supporting the UK at that time, I instead explored SkypeKit and Tropo, finding much more potential available via Tropo at that time.