Introducing TelAPI
telapi.com
Introducing TelAPI – Today’s Most Feature Rich Telephony API
telapi.com
Kinda makes this sound like you've never heard of Twilio. And given that a lot of your audience has heard of them, it makes you look a little naive.
I think a better way to put it (paraphrasing) would be to say TelAPI is the best way to build applications that use voice and SMS. Go on the attack and demonstrate why you're better. Show that implementation with the competition requires more code or certain functionality just isn't possible.
We do acknowledge Twilio and respect what they've done so far. Though, we're confident TelAPI's increased set of features are well-suited to satisfy the needs of developers building systems with highly custom telephony requirements. Twilio's solved 80% of the problem. We're out there to solve the remaining 20%.
"The ability to set your outbound Caller ID to any number" - This is an attribute in our <Dial> element which allows developers to build systems that initiate calls from the phone number of their choosing. E.g. I can initiate a call to Bob from phone number (555) 555-5555. I.e. it doesn't have to be from my TelAPI number.
"Reverse carrier lookups on phone numbers"- TelAPI provides a way to look up the carrier of a phone number via the REST API.
"Flat-rate unlimited inbound calling to your TelAPI phone numbers" - For businesses/users racking up the voice mins per month, they can opt to buy an unlimited inbound channel for $27/mo instead of paying min/mo rates.
"Voice and audio effects on your phone calls" - These allow developers to modify the pitch and tone of a caller's voice (and basically make their voice sound like anyone they want). We also offer an ambient noise feature to add background noise to calls (e.g. city traffic, poor reception, etc).
"Private number Caller ID unblocking" - Upon receiving calls from blocked numbers, users are able to ascertain the callerID. Our parent company TelTech developed an application called TrapCall which takes advantage of this.
"Premium transcriptions with human processed dictation Speech recognition" - We offer four different transcription services (varying based on a developer's/business's needs) which allow consumers to record their calls and have the dialogues from the calls captured in text.
Thanks for the question!
Still, it's good to see competition emerging in this space.
It's really important to us at TelAPI to expose as many features to developers as possible. Telcos offer all of these features to different businesses and organizations already. Consequently, we want to ensure they're available to every developer as well.
There's so much room for innovation in the telephony space, we want to ensure TelAPI facilities it in every way possible.
We're really excited to see what you guys come up with!
Consumers in this space have a great deal of feature/pricing autonomy. So when it comes to selecting a telephony API that's right for them, they're well-positioned to identify the best feature/pricing balance.
Thanks again for the comment!
It seems most people are copying Twilios, but at this point we have Tropo, Twilio, Plivio, TelAPI (Thank you for not having a wierd name at least), my own Open Source server, and whatever extensions are going to get baked into the next Asterisk and FreeSWITCH versions...
I believe the community would do itself a great service to agree on at least a few standards....
The problem with those two standards, is that they are not being followed well, and are also far to granular for most implementations. Twilio was a real breakthrough in terms of getting projects off the ground fast.
Tropo and Plivo have also emerged as additional options in that space.
The main problem I see with this new API is that there really is no incentive for me to go to them over Twilio, Tropo or Plivo. What Twilio doesn't provide is covered well by Tropo and Plivo. The only interesting thing offered is unlimited inbound per channel, however, if you have SIP, you can get it cheaper from companies like FlowRoute (http://flowroute.com/services/inbound/) and pay $18 per channel, rather than $27.
Compare this with: Twilio - first mover, known reputation, strong funding. Tropo - backed by Voxeo (over a decade in business), offers many enterprise-grade things; Prism (IVR server) is opensource. Plivo - a lot cheaper than everyone else, and offers open source layer for FreeSWITCH.
I think you'll find that we're approaching telephony from a different perspective. We're a bootstrapped company of developers building a product for developers. Our users and our product are what matter most to us (along with maintaining a sustainable business of course). We love this stuff! We have no interest in catering to VCs.
How about this, I'll give you $50 in free credits (on top of the initial $25) and you can hack away with TelAPI and tell us what we're doing wrong and what we're doing right. We'd love to hear your thoughts.
What do you think?
2. "Unblock caller ID"? You mean, perform a CNAM lookup on the number? If a caller doesn't send a number, that's sorta that. I'm guessing you're just referring to the flag "hey please don't display the number or lookup a name", right?
As far as setting caller-ID, that's great. Do you have a plan to deal with abuse, which is why I imagine Twilio disables it for the masses? (Not that it's hard to do at all, from a technical perspective.) And of course, not available for doing with SMS.
Good luck!
1. The flat-rate is $27/mo per channel. TelAPI also offers channel bursting . This ultimately means developers and businesses have on demand access to additional channels for TelAPI numbers with unlimited inbound calls. E.g. You have 1 unlimited inbound number with 10 channels. Then you receive an 11th call. Channel bursting ensures the call can still access the application and won't ring busy.
2) CallID unmasking allows developers and businesses to identify the number and ID of calls received from 'Blocked' and 'Private' numbers to your TelAPI number
Our parent company TelTech uses it for one of their products: http://www.trapcall.com/
What's the underlying infrastructure? :)
How you interface with the stack is only half the problem, the underlying stack is where we innovate. Everybody has Rest APIs, but not too many companies are working on interfacing with equipment and dealing with core scaling issues (keeping state across the cluster becomes very interesting at scale).
This is cool, but as everyone else has noted, this is becoming a crowded space. Can you talk a bit about your underlying infrastructure? Are you guys a Freeswitch shop or did you reinvent the wheel in some capacity?
Curious :).
Can you point me towards some of your work? I'd love to learn more about what you're doing with the underlying stack.
Thanks man