by Evan Cooke, Twilio Co-Founder & CTO This week is a big week for telephony. After years of development, Google Voice is preparing to launch to the general public.
The launch is a milestone, in many respects:
- It demonstrates that there is still innovation in the phone 130 years after the first telephone call.
- It illustrates the benefits of tight integration between the web and the traditional phone network.
- It introduces IVR concepts to a broader customer audience. The idea that anyone can provision phone numbers (like DNS names) and route calls between them with user-defined logic is incredibly powerful.
While Google Voice isn’t explicitly extensible, you can route your Twilio calls to and from your Google Voice account. Imagine you want to add a more complex routing function that depends on your local database; you could route certain calls from your Google Voice account to your Twilio provisioned number and handle the logic with Twilio.
Build Your Own Google Voice with Twilio
Twilio also offers all the basic building blocks needed to create your own mini-Google Voice:
- Inbound/Outbound calling
- Keypad Input and conditional call routing
- Call screening
- Voicemail recording
- Speech-to-Text transcription
If you have cool mashups you’ve build with Google Voice and Twilio, please let us know: help@twilio.com
I was just thinking the other day that I could basically build my own Google Voice with Twilio. The transcription quality highlighting would be hard though. Even then, Google's has some problems so they haven't slammed the door on that one.
Twilio is a really great platform and I've been working on an IVR to put in front of my cell / Google numbers for a little while now. I love seeing the apps / mashups people are developing with it!
Keep up the good work!
Posted by: Andrew Watson | June 29, 2009 at 05:56 PM
duh... FollowMe, MeetMe, VoiceMail, Conference, IVR, etc... Asterisk has been doing all those milestones for a decade now...
Posted by: Joel Bryan Juliano | June 30, 2009 at 05:13 AM
Google Voice is making IVR concepts and programmability available to a much broader non-enterprise audience. The idea that normal consumers are put in control of when and where call gets routed is really powerful. While the underlying technology has existed for years, Google is taking that technology and packaging it in a way that makes it as accessible as GMail.
As an aside, Twilio will be presenting at both OSCON09 http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2009 and Astricon09 http://www.astricon.net/ talking about open source, Asterisk, and Twilio!
Posted by: Evan Cooke | June 30, 2009 at 08:58 AM