Show HN: Switchboard – makes it easy to route incoming calls and messages | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Switchboard – makes it easy to route incoming calls and messages

goswitchboard.com

43 pointsmarvinpinto18 comments

Open articleView on HN

This is awesome! I even wrote a script a while back to do this. https://github.com/Danilka/twilio-forwarding

The main question: Can I answer text messages that were forwarded to me / initiate a call back from that number?

What about advance routing? Based on time or external sources? Numbers blocking, etc.?

Feedback on setup:

- It was super confusing to connect Twilio account that I already had.

- Signing up with Gmail only made me think for a second.

- Twilio connector only worked on a third try.

- I doubt that I would pay $6/mo for it when the time comes :-( Maybe a couple of bux, but not 6. (I don't want to discourage you here, just trying to be honest and give unfiltered feedback as a user, who is very interested.)

I hope you guys succeed, this would be great!

P.S. Awesome name for such a product!

Hey, thank you for your feedback!

Two-way messaging and call proxying is likely the next big features we'll be rolling out.

We went with the Twilio Connect route initially as a low-risk approach to see if there's an appetite for a something like this. Sadly it has not been a great user experience and we're definitely going to reconsider it (Twilio Connect).

As you might have guessed, we haven't actually decided on pricing yet but I wanted to put something on that page so that people can get a feel for how much it would cost them.

And yeah, the system we were using for auth (Cognito) did not at that time have an adequate 2FA solution, which was why we went with Google. Now that they do, we'll likely use that which would allow people to also signup with a username/password (in addition to Google, etc).

It's cool that you're not locked into Switchboard if you sign up for the service. You can always go back to managing your calls some other way. You're locked into Twilio, of course, but that doesn't seem like much of an inconvenience.

I dont clearly understand who migt need this, since any SIP account comes with these features (purchase from any voip service provider or host your softswitch like Asterisk, Mizu softswitch or 3CX).

It’s a Google Voice replacement.

Great project and product. I had GrandCentral (now Google Voice) which I loved, but is clearly under-supported (nearly abandoned?) by Google -- this was immensely helpful during my traveling consultant days where i'd find myself on different desks everyday. I'd love to find a commercial-grade stable product (i hope you are it?!)

I wouldn't say abandoned as there was a massive facelift for both the mobile app and the web interface recently.

However, it doesn't seem to be a primary concern for them as it does take a significant amount of time for those updates to come to fruition.

I wouldn't say we're commercial-grade just yet. We'll get there though :)

This seems like a nice product, but unfortunately I can't create an account - after signing in via my Google account, I was redirected to a page [1] with an infinitely looping loading gif. I tried clearing my cookies for the domain, but no luck.

I'm running Chromium 64 on Linux.

[1]: account.goswitchboard.com/signup

Heya, I think I got to the root cause of that issue and I deployed an updated version that (hopefully) fixes it.

If you would still like to give it another shot I would appreciate it :)

Nope, still doesn't work. Here's a dump of the console log in case it's of any help: http://ix.io/ER9

The console dump was super useful, thank you for that!

I think it might be because you have third-party cookies disabled [1], and the Google Auth client uses an iframe with cookies to do its thing. I replicated it myself by disabling third-party cookies and the results were similar to what you described.

I'll look into what I can do about this on my end tomorrow. Thank you again for your time!

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42806178/1101070

Interesting. I log into a handful of other sites using Google OAuth and have never had a problem. Let me know if you get it figured out, I would still like to check out your service.

Hmm that is odd. Another person reported this as well and I'll take a look at it and get back to you. Sorry about that.

I like the basic idea of the service. Having to have an additional Twilio account is somewhat complicated and does not add to an easy user experience.

As a developer I REALLY like the fact that I can connect it to my Twilio account and have full control over my numbers. This way I don't have to deal with overcharges and can keep/port the number through Twilio.

As a consumer, it will probably be hard to scale this. But you can always add an option.

Smart move for the product introduction to a niche audience!

You can always port it’s not legal for someone to try and prevent you from porting a local number and in most casses the provider can’t stop it

You are right. Twilio Connect has sadly not been a great user experience and this is something we're reconsidering. We used it initially because it was a low-risk approach to see if people would use a product like this. Thank you for your feedback :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com