Twilio created Google Voice for web-applications

Virtual PBX systems emerged long ago and gradually taking the market share from traditional PBX. This kind of service is even available for consumers - for example, Google Voice - the personal virtual PBX, which handles incoming calls, SMS and voicemail. But the main drawback of such services (for business) is that they are designed for interaction with people, but not with applications. At the same time, to improve business performance, each call should be at least logged in some application (e.g. in CRM system), and better - initiate some automated operations (for example, open the card of calling customer or solve customer problems by the interactive voice menu). Therefore, recently the API-voice services, which allow to easily integrate telephony into web-applications, appeared. Twilio - is one of them.

It works like that. When a call incomes to your Twilio-number, the service sends http-request to your web-application. This request contains the caller data (at first - phone number). Your application can processes this data, perform the necessary automatic operations and sends back (to Twilio) an XML with commands - for example, to start call recording, redirect the call to a certain number, send an SMS or ask the caller something (with a human voice). The caller may respond by pressing buttons on the phone or by voice, which will be transcripted to text. Having received a new reply, Twilio again sends the data to your application and the interaction between the caller and your app will continue.

Text to voice and voice to text transcription - these are services on which Twillo earns money. In addition, it sells the phone numbers, outgoing call minutes and charges a fee for sending SMS and storing voicemail at your online account.



To help developers, Twilio recently released OpenVBX - open php/mysql system, which is installed on your own server and provides the visual designer helping to create different interaction algorithms - voice applications. And to integrate Twilio with business application you just need to develop a plug-in for OpenVBX.

Twilio competitors are Tropo and Ribbit.

See also: Top 10 VoIP services