So what's new Twilio can offer here? I have no idea why USV invested in them...
Twilio lets a modestly competent web developer program a telecommunications company from their kitchen table in about, oh, six weeks or so. Alternatively, Twlio lets a modestly competent web developer take an existing app and add voice/SMS features to it in about a day. (Have a social site? Want to do SMS notifications when something important happens? You can implement that in four hours.)
Thanks for the summary of what Twilio makes possible.
What nivertech (who you responded to) knows and was trying to say is this:
With Voxeo (and others) a competent web developer has been able to create a telecom company in six weeks - or add voice features in less than a day - for ten years now. Voxeo delivered and has grown a completely free web-based telephony developer program since 2000.
And since 2000 over 200,000 developers have used Voxeo to do just that.
This is the Voxeo developer site in the wayback machine archive from August 19, 2000:
Quoting that site:
"our mission at voxeo community is to make it as easy as possible for web developers, service providers, and enterprises to create and deploy applications for an existing market of 1.5 billion telephone users.
existing web developers & services use technologies like Perl, PHP, Cold Fusion, Microsoft ASP and Java Servlets to create web applications for traditional web browsers via HTML. we make it just as easy to use those technologies to create web applications for telephones, using phone markup languages such as VoiceXML, Microsoft WTE, and CallXML."
Here's the juicy part:
"if you have experience creating web applications, this site will help you create and test your first phone application in less than an hour -- without any new hardware or software."
Sound familiar? :)
What Twilio has done that's new is use marketing and hype to convince developers they invented something that was invented by others and available for a decade now. The power of hype never ceases to amaze me.
To be fair, Twilio also did a great job creating more modern developer documentation and refocusing on simplicity. These are things Voxeo had drifted away from as we grew into "the man". In short, we got distracted by million dollar deals with enterprises and carriers. We've continued to invest in our developer community but things got increasingly complex as we added more and more features and options over time.
Our new Voxeo Labs group - and it's Tropo.com service - was created to fix that. We're behind on the evangelism but way ahead on the technology. And I dare say we're getting better at evangelism every week. ;)
-Jonathan
--
[1] infrastructure jockey != web developer.
message "something important happened", {:to => '14155551212', :network => 'SMS'}
And then one line of code to hit our session API over http and run the code.
The founder of Zappos is actually Nick Swinmurn even though many people still think it was Tony. Tony probably owns a lot more of Zappos than Nick, but neither of them had anything to do with Tellme.
Mike McCue was the founder of Tellme who most recently departed from Microsoft, and before Tellme he worked at Netscape.
To do it yourself you need to line up your outbound SIP providers, inbound DID providers (not one and the same once you dig into the details), then you need to operate a bunch of Freeswitch / Asterisk / whatever SIP servers, and learn how to program them, and learn how keep them running smooth (Not particularly difficult, but in terms of learning requirements - it's akin to meeting a database + web server for the first time).
Due to the real-time nature of telcos (and I mean that in the traditional clock-synch'd sense of the word) there are additional complications if you want to use a virtualised OS.
You dont need a bunch of servers either. If you are doing more than 200 simultaneous calls ( freeswitch easily achieves this on 1 box ) you shouldnt be looking at these entry level systems; Voxeo, Tropo's parent company has an incredibly powerful platform.
1. Cheaper
2. Multiple voices and accents (UK British Male & Female)
3. Use any number as caller ID.
4. Calls during development are free.
5. Recordings are a breeze
6. Voice recognition from a set of options instead of pressing digits (eg. "Say yes, no or repeat").
On the downside, I've found their system wasn't quite as easy to get going with as Twilio, but it is much more powerful.
Twilio have been more visible and active - Tropo seem slightly behind in evangelism and generally pimping their product.
1) I wouldn't say "slightly". 2) Twilio's great at it because Danielle was employee #1 at Twilio. Marketing and evangelism are in Twilio's DNA.
Twilio is great at marketing and evangelism. Twilio is way ahead on that front. That's their DNA.
Voxeo is great at feature innovation and platform implementation. Voxeo is way ahead on that front. That's Voxeo's DNA.
Also not sure if you've seen this, but you can pick from English, French, German, and Spanish accents here: http://www.twilio.com/say
I agree with point "3" though. I use Twilio for an app which sends voice call reminders to other people. But when automatic reminder call goes to these people, it goes from a 1-877 number and many people don't pick up the phone thinking that it's a spam number. Instead if I could call from the number of an original user who sets the reminder, that would be really great.
Point "6" also seem to be great, and I'm sure Twilio will add that.
But somehow, the article coming from Tropo's evangelist is not strong enough or convincing to make a switch from Twilio to Tropo. In fact you did a good job in highlighting some of the technical differences. I think the post lacks these kinds of specifics.
There is a validation that has to be done with the number to make sure you own it, but you should be able to use it as much as you want after that first validation.
Also, I wanted to make sure I understand, what kind of specifics did you feel are lacking in Diggz post? We love to learn how to improve our product and our communication about it. If you are up for discussing it we will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. Just email me at jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
-Jonathan (CEO Voxeo)
We've got a big release coming that makes Tropo much easier to use. Entirely new documentation, sanded off some of the rough edges on features, added new ones to make some use cases simpler.
I'd love to hear about the specific road bumps that made it harder for you, it would really help us improve our simplicity. We will give you $100 on Amazon or Paypal for your time. If you're interested email jtaylor at voxeo dot com.
edit: to downvoter, i just wanna hear from danielle himself about this qoute, no harm mean
First - Danielle I have the utmost respect for you and the marketing momentum you've been able to build around Twilio. However, saying the "quote is completely fabricated" is itself is fabricated ;) It's not a quote - it's a reference to something you said at ITExpo west this year. Diggz wasn't there, but he (and I) were told by multiple people that you said it.
Voxeo is an extremely open and honest company. I mean extremely. I seriously doubt any single Voxeon would make this up, never-mind multiple Voxeons. It's personally important to me to resolve this because I feel the honor and honesty of Voxeo is being challenged when you say it's "completely fabricated". Are you claiming you said nothing at all like that?
Second, wether you now acknowledge saying it or not… to be frank, in my (and many other web-powered telephony industry vets) opinion it happens to be pretty darn true. Twilio has done a great job focusing on simplicity. Twilio is many great things - but Twilio is not innovative. I'm not trying to be a competitor or a jerk when I say that… I honestly have not seen a single technology innovation delivered by Twlio. If you disagree, please suggest a few and so I and others who have been doing this for ten years can openly and fairly respond.
I'll give you some examples of what I mean - compared to Voxeo. But I want to make it clear that this is not all about Voxeo. You could also make comparisons to TelMe, Bevocal, Telera, Motorola and several others who were around ten years ago. Voxeo is far from being the only company that invented and innovated the web telephony industry ten years ago:
1. Voxeo created and patented most of the technology and concepts Twilio uses today . in 2000, as shown here:
2. Like Voxeo, Twilio makes it easy for any web developer to create telephony applications, with a focus on lower cost and ease of use. Voxeo has done that for ten years, as shown from the archived Voxeo developer web site on August 19, 2000:
Sound like a familiar message?
3. Their are slides in Twilio's 2008-2009 investor presentation which are nearly an exact duplicate of Voxeo's 1999-2000 investor presentation. To be clear, I don't know if Twilio's founders saw our presentation but the business plan concepts are so similar that slides were nearly exactly duplicated. Down to the words and diagrams used.
4. Twilio leveraged "super angels" to help build marketing momentum. Although the term didn't exist back then, Voxeo's angel investors in 2000 included Eric Schmidt (now CEO of Google), Dale Fuller (then CEO of Borland), and David Orfao (then CEO of Allaire) ... they helped us build significant marketing momentum.
5. This is the first Voxeo example app in our docs, circa 2000:
<callxml> <text>Hello World</text> </callxml>
This is the first Twilio example in your docs, ten years later:
<Response> <Say>Hello Monkey</say> </Response>
All marketing BS and propaganda aside: Voxeo and Tropo.com are just way ahead of Twilio when it comes to innovation and features. Everything Twilio has today Voxeo had ten years ago. And Voxeo/Tropo have many features Twilio doesn't: voice recognition, open SIP access, Skype integration, universal API for voice / SMS / IM / Twitter / etc, open source web client access (phono.com), direct Ruby/PHP/Phython/Groovy script language support (no need to force everything into XML and back to get things done)… there is no way Twilio could keep up match Voxeo / Tropo innovation and features, because Twilio is ten years behind from the get-go. And Voxeo is investing more in new innovation and features today than ever.
I and the rest of Voxeo have always tipped our hats to Twilio when it comes to your marketing, modern web developer outreach, refocusing on simplicity, pricing models, etc. Seriously, hats off.
However, the singular thing that bugs me (and other industry vets) about Twilio is how Twilio pretends they invented all these features and is a really innovative company. I thought your comments and "tip of the hat" to Voxeo and Tropo on innovative features at ITExpo west was the first time Twilio has publicly been a bit honest about this. I'm honestly disappointed to see you may be returning to Twilio the party line. I hope that's not the case.
-Jonathan (CEO, Voxeo)
I respect Danielle and Twilio for making this statement at the time. As it is clear today that Twilio has a wide gap with Tropo on features. Twilio's focus on their core strength, simplicity, was smart. 37Signals has pioneered the idea of less is more with great success (albeit with an eye to staying private without VC funding).
The issue is, I think Twilio has come to the realization that to compete in this space they need more depth of capability. Further, the ITExpo statement was made before Twilio received their latest round of funding. They may very well have changed strategy and now regret having made this statement.
It is much easier to close the gap on simplicity than it is a wide feature gap. We are working regularly to make Tropo simpler, while maintaining its deep feature set. We are built on a platform, PRISM, that allows us to focus on the platform features rather than internals allowing us to innovate rapidly.
A Twilio individual confirmed at CloudCamp QCon in San Francisco that they are working to replace Asterisk (http://asterisk.org) as their key telephony engine. Further evidence of this is that Twilio, for the first time, is working hard to hire telephony experts. Whereas previously they were proud that they did not have telephony experts in-house and would actually plug this as a benefit.
It will continue to be hard for Twilio to catch-up to Tropo, given that they are having to spend time replacing the core fabric that they built their platform on. I suspect that they are most likely targeting Freeswitch (http://freeswitch.org) since Asterisk SCF (http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk/scf) is still a nascent project. I wish them luck with that, as replacing your core telephony engine is no trivial task.
Effective at getting me to open the email, but I always feel deceived when I open it up to see the cookie-cutter mail that they've sent me.
That said, I've been working with Twilio on and off for 2 years and have never received an email like this from them.
edit: If I did run adhearsion/asterisk, what do I just have to connect it to a phone line? Vague on the setup needed to do this...
Our Mirador IVR application monitoring service is exactly what you are looking for. It is one thing to regularly call a given number - which can indeed be hacked quite easily using either Tropo, Asterisk, etc, it is another thing to send daily, weekly, monthly and yearly report to reflect the actual state of the IVR application over time. Call setup time? Greeting time? Transaction failure? Call setup failure? Moreover, you probably want to get an email or SMS notification whenever a defect occurs (otherwise, what's the point of monitoring?) Plus, you probably also happen to want to get a notification for the alarm restore right? While we are at it, I am sure you want those reports available online in a secure location or as a PDF document.
You get all this with Mirador!
I have received your request this morning through our website and you should have received my reply by now ;-)
What’s in your IVR application monitoring report? http://blog.nuecho.com/2010/12/14/whats-in-your-ivr-applicat...
Enjoy!
The best thing, this is done remotely like a real customer calling in taking into account outside influences you cannot test from the inside only.
1 to hundreds of calls are placed that exercise the system as many times per hour that is needed, and each call is being checked for and reported back on call quality, availability, times at each step, proper greeting and what the customer feels is important to know.
They offer a trial as well if interested. http://www.iq-services.com/heartbeat.asp
If you run an asterisk server the easiest way to get it hooked up to the phone network is by setting up a SIP account for it.
How is the pricing on NuGram? Is this it? http://www.grammarserver.com/welcome
I'm finding their descriptions a bit opaque. Do you remember the product name off hand? Do they host it, or do I need to look into learning what an SIP is? :-)
We don't provide a complete self-service setup process yet We are working on that. Just apply for the free trial and we'll help you bootstrap the whole thing.
--Dominique (Nu Echo's CTO)
This is why Digium has created a new project: Asterisk Scalable Communications Framework (SCF - http://www.asterisk.org/asterisk/scf). Although Asterisk SCF is still in prototype stage and 12-18 months from a fully baked alpha. An interesting approach, but not here yet.
Folks from Twilio have confirmed they are trying to move away from Asterisk, I suspect to Freeswitch. While Freeswitch has better scale, it suffers from some of the same fundamental architectural issues Asterisk has for large distributed telephony applications.
Full disclosure, I am the VP of Innovation at Voxeo Labs, the group responsible for Tropo. Further, I was invited by Digium and attended their closed discussion and launch of the Asterisk SCF platform in Huntsville last spring.
Citation from something they said, or just deducting this the same way I did? (experience with Asterisk...)
>While Freeswitch has better scale, it suffers from some of the same fundamental architectural issues Asterisk has for large distributed telephony applications.
What are the same 'fundamental' architectural issues? They've seem to taken quite a different approach, or do you just feel C is the wrong way to go for a highly concurrent, scalable system?
PRISM is a highly scalable, reliable, and extensible communications application server. It's a very proven platform and is used by several of the largest consumer and commercial VoIP providers. It's also used in Microsoft's Tellme service and is the foundation of all of Voxeo's products and services.
Asterisk can be painful, but they have a new ground-up project in very-early (pre-beta) stage called Asterisk SCF that is designed to achieve PRISM-like capabilities.
It's a shame, because it is pretty great. I think the word is finally getting out now, though.
FWIW we're not totally over the moon with Twilio, and I've since discovered freeswitch, which is much more developer friendly and scalable than asterisk.
It's all but persuaded me to roll our own telco connectivity.
If you like Freeswitch, you'd probably like Tropo. Tropo lets you program directly in Javscript and other languages, just like Freeswitch.
Tropo also lets you roll your own. You can download Prism, which include the Tropo engine, here:
I've been in the telephony for 15 years now. If I can help with your explorations at all, feel free to email me: jtaylor at voxeo dot com
-Jonathan (Voxeo/Tropo CEO)
1. having the voice scripts written in Ruby and hosted by Tropo was easier than building a web service to control every mundane aspect
2. Tropo would supply non-U.S. numbers if I needed them
3. Tropo made it easy to do the voice recording and POST it as an MP3
4. Tropo worked out cheaper for my little test service
Some or all of these may now have changed but i'd still give Tropo first choice in any future projects
-Jonathan (CEO, Voxeo)
(a) Speed of SMS deliverability (# of SMS that can be delivered per minute)
(b) Confirmation of SMS (i.e. can we be sure that the SMS was indeed delivered)
(c) Availability of phone numbers in different area codes
From a shortcode, there's no limit. And Tropo's connected directly to the SMS carriers, so you can deliver at a significant rate.
We don't provide delivery confirmation of SMS today. That's coming soon however. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that delivery can only be confirmed to the carrier. Handset delivery receipts are flaky at best. Not all handsets support sending delivery receipts, those that do often allow the user to disable it, and some carriers will block the receipt.
We have phone numbers in about 280 area codes and 41 countries. Not all of the area codes are available in the UI yet, so if you need one and don't see it, send an email to support and we'll hook you up.
Just to summarize the facts, and in general there is a consensus here:
1.Twilio is easier to get started
2.Tropo has more features
3.Both end up costing around the same.
So I would say, as a developer, just try both the platforms or atleast read through the features and make an informed decision about which platform to go with for your customers as ultimately they are the ones we are trying to service.
I didn't know who the author was prior to this post but from his about page he's the co-founder of Voxeo so this post is hardly impartial. He can write whatever he wants on his blog obviously, but keep that in mind. Comments on the site were also moderated preventing responses from some people.
It is not true that we only work with one carrier. We work with a variety of carriers to maximize our capabilities, geographic reach and redundancy. Twilio works with most of the same carriers as Google Voice.
In regards to prank calling, every phone service is used for pranks, Tropo included. In our case, it's a byproduct of making it easy for any web developer to get started in minutes. However, we've put in place safeguards (most notably validating outgoing caller IDs before they can be used) to minimize these types of activities.
We pride ourselves on support. We monitor Twitter constantly, we have people in IRC all the time (set office hours is just a focused discussion topic), and we try to respond to emails and forum posts as fast as possible. We have a team of people scouring Stack Overflow, Hacker News and events all over the country helping developers with their questions, related to Twilio OR NOT. Go find any blog post written about Twilio and see how quickly we responded. We answer the phones when you call, though we have some area to improve in that regard. We're actively working on it.
We support developers like nobody else. We feature them on our site in our Gallery http://www.twilio.com/gallery, we tweet about them, we blog regularly about what our customers build, we have a weekly developer contest to reward cool new apps and we generally go to great lengths to help promote what developers and startups are building using Twilio. We exist to empower you. We'd much rather talk about the cool problems real working developers solving then toot our own horn.
Everyone here knows how good EC2 is, I don't think I need to defend that issue. It's working wonderfully for us. We don't have any capacity or other issues related to our infrastructure. On a more general capacity note, we have yet to hit a limit of what we can handle, and we've worked on some huge projects. Go look at our customer list. These companies would not work with us if we couldn't handle their demands: http://www.twilio.com/gallery/customers These are just scratching the surface. There's another class of customer that's even bigger but doesn't like being talked about publicly.
We're hyper-focused on web developers. We (I'm a web dev myself) don't care about complicated telephony issues. We're too busy solving problems. Twilio works the way we work. Before I worked at Twilio I struggled trying to implement features that took me minutes once I discovered the Twilio API. It already spoke what I knew already and that's just simply HTTP.
We are not the right solution for every single developer; nothing is. But we have a rock solid solution that's working for over 20,000 developers and growing rapidly. If you're conflicted, try both services out for yourself. Don't listen to either company, just see for yourself which you like better. And if we can help in any way, we're listening.
If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me directly at jsheehan@twilio.com
