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Comment by aroch | Hacker News Reader

I've played wit Twilio and have used it to extend some of the hooks I previously had in IFTTT. Additionally I've been toying with porting my number out of Google Voice for compatibility (ie. no MMS) and privacy reasons. My question is, how hard would it be to build your own personal Google Voice like service around the twilio API, or has anyone done this?

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I set up a quick and dirty version of GV with one of their provided Twimlets[1]. All it does is record a message, transcribe it, then send the results to my email address. My wife and I used this, for example, when looking for a mortgage loan (they never. stop. calling.)

I've thought long and hard about building something more complicated but I was always sort of stopped by the lack of MMS and my (apparently faulty) understanding of how their Caller ID works[2]. Not anymore!

[1]: https://www.twilio.com/labs/twimlets/voicemail

[2]: Previously I had thought you could only set registered numbers as caller ID, but turns out if you dial out while processing an incoming call you can set the caller ID as the incoming number. See here: https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/twiml/dial#attributes-caller...

I did the same thing: I wanted something like Google Voice, but it was impossible to make it work here in Canada. I also have a tiny little HTML page you can use to retrieve your voicemail and transcriptions:

https://github.com/mmastrac/snippets/tree/gh-pages/voicemail

Obviously you'd want to host that yourself somewhere private and possibly hard-code the keys.

Ha, I've setup the very same twimlet. My hangup was also the same as yours, I couldn't justify spending the time to figure out the, often confusing, API just to have no MMS still. I guess it's time to find some free time to hack one together!

Better Voice[1] is pretty close and reasonably priced. They use Twilio so I'm sure they'll add MMS support soon. Disclaimer: I know the founders.

1: https://www.bettervoice.com/

Looks a little more involved than I need -- I already have SIP trunking through someone else, I mostly just need the SMS/MMS side of life

OpenVBX (http://www.openvbx.org/) does exactly this and runs on twilio however it's a bit of a chore to setup on EC2 and unfortunately development isn't that active so I wouldn't expect to see MMS anytime soon. A real shame.

I used it to setup a menu with recordings and things like'press 1 for support' to route calls for our sales and support teams.

I did this and released it as an iOS app (http://www.lineup-app.com). It's not free, but it is built entirely on Twilio's APIs and has most of GV's functionality. I currently live in Berlin and use it all the time with my "old" US number (after porting it to Twilio).

I built a little prototype for a 24-hour Meteor Hackathon:

https://callmemaybe.meteor.com/

Unfortunately, the Connect API was a bit confusing to implement, so you actually have to paste in your API key.

My goal is to rewrite it soon with basic features like call forwarding, blocking, etc.

I wrote an app that has some GV-like functionality built on Twilio: https://www.getphonecard.net

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