AnyRoom – A self-hosted, Twilio-based system for temporary conference calls (opens in new tab)

(anyroom.io)

110 pointsthenrich998y ago27 comments

27 comments

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.

Sreyanth8y ago

Absolutely. There's one more I just posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446337

lima8y ago

Jitsi Meet works great for us.

Integrated with the company VOIP system = bliss

Happy to answer questions!

nachtigall8y ago

How does Jitsi Meet compare to https://talky.io/ concerning stability, UX, ease of use etc?

brunoqc8y ago

How does the integration with your VoIP system work?

lima8y ago

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

ap468y ago

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

forvelin8y ago

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.

lucasverra8y ago

always had bad results for appear.in while conferencing (1to1 works ok)

lima8y ago

Jitsi Meet :)

notum8y ago

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-st8y ago

What's your opinion on 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?

gregmac8y ago

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...

1 more reply

anc848y ago

Aww, that means "in the toilet" in German.

Anyways, that is not FOSS. And worse, they mention patents on their developments.

yeukhon8y ago

Firefox had this "Firefox Hello" but only one-on-call. Sadly they discountined it.

iDemonix8y ago

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?

tyingq8y ago

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)

casca8y ago

Written in Go, source is here: https://github.com/thenrich/rooms

Sir_Cmpwn8y ago

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

upofadown8y ago

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...

pedrocr8y ago

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.

LogicX8y ago

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

tyingq8y ago

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.

thenrich99OP8y ago

(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.

1 more reply

wastedhours8y ago

We've also had a lot of issues with some other conference tools, especially with different software stacks/plugins etc..., so having a quickfire backup solution that we can get to in minutes is useful (esp. compared to "mobile phone on speaker" in an empty corner of the office we've had to resort to in the past), even if it just voice.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

27 comments

LukasRos8y ago

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.

Sreyanth8y ago

Absolutely. There's one more I just posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14446337

lima8y ago

Jitsi Meet works great for us.

Integrated with the company VOIP system = bliss

Happy to answer questions!

nachtigall8y ago

How does Jitsi Meet compare to https://talky.io/ concerning stability, UX, ease of use etc?

brunoqc8y ago

How does the integration with your VoIP system work?

lima8y ago

https://github.com/jitsi/jigasi

ap468y ago

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

forvelin8y ago

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.

lucasverra8y ago

always had bad results for appear.in while conferencing (1to1 works ok)

lima8y ago

Jitsi Meet :)

notum8y ago

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-st8y ago

gregmac8y ago

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

1 more reply

anc848y ago

Aww, that means "in the toilet" in German.

Anyways, that is not FOSS. And worse, they mention patents on their developments.

yeukhon8y ago

Firefox had this "Firefox Hello" but only one-on-call. Sadly they discountined it.

iDemonix8y ago

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?

tyingq8y ago

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)

casca8y ago

Written in Go, source is here: https://github.com/thenrich/rooms

Sir_Cmpwn8y ago

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

upofadown8y ago

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...

pedrocr8y ago

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.

LogicX8y ago

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

tyingq8y ago

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

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.

thenrich99OP8y ago

(Creator here)

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

1 more reply

wastedhours8y ago

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse