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Why choose Tropo over Twilio

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Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#31

Post by ericb »

I was looking at creating an IVR monitoring tool. I would like to 1-make a call every hour, 2-record the response, and ideally 3-verify the response matches the expected. Thoughts? It looks like twilio and tropi might be able to do this (although I wasn't sure they weren't more focused on inbound), but the 1 cent price is prohibitive for what people might pay per-month especially at higher monitoring frequencies. Anyone have other solutions that are reasonably simple?

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...

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#32

Post by akalsey »

blitzo wrote: post #23

"Twilio would never be able to keep up with Tropo on features" -Danielle Morrill, Twilio head marketing edit: to downvoter, i just wanna hear from danielle himself about this qoute, no harm mean

Danielle said this during the API panel moderated by Thomas Howe at ITExpo West in October this year. When asked of the differences, she said that Twilio was focused on growing the market and making it easy for web devs instead of trying to keep up with Tropo on features. Many itexpo sessions are recorded. There may be audio or video of this somewhere.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#33

Post by steveklabnik »

patio11 wrote: post #9
nivertech wrote: post #4

Twilio always seems like a hack to me. Once VoiceXML/CCML was hot market with many startups competing, with biggest exit being Tellme acquired by Microsoft for $800M (same people who founded Zappos). So what's new Twilio can offer here? I have no idea why USV invested in them...

So what's new Twilio can offer here? 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 fo…

I implemented "text me when someone orders" in about 25 minutes of time, from clicking "sign up" to "cap deploy." Super awesome.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#34

Post by mahmud »

patio11 wrote: post #9
nivertech wrote: post #4

Twilio always seems like a hack to me. Once VoiceXML/CCML was hot market with many startups competing, with biggest exit being Tellme acquired by Microsoft for $800M (same people who founded Zappos). So what's new Twilio can offer here? I have no idea why USV invested in them...

So what's new Twilio can offer here? 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 fo…

I am far from being modestly competent as a web developer[1] and I was able to hack a voice menu in 30 minutes, in Lisp, before I knew XML.

--

[1] infrastructure jockey != web developer.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#35

Post by garply »

danielle17 wrote: post #29
garply wrote: post #3

I have a gripe against Twilio. Aside from their China service sucking, they keep sending me newsletters or emails that are tailored to look like they're personally written to me. The subject looks like "RE: Twilio's Developer Community" and then the text preview in gmail looks something like "Hi Joe, I wanted to drop..." Effective at getting me to open the email, but I always feel deceived when I open it up to see th…

hey curious to know what you mean about "Chinese service sucking" since we're not international yet... are you referring to outbound calls to Chinese numbers, or something else?

Outbound calls to a Chinese number had a failure rate of about 50% (failed with a couple of different error messages, can't quite remember what exactly they were anymore, although I remember thinking they didn't seem particularly relevant... like claiming the number dialed was busy even when it definitely wasn't, etc). Also sometimes the calls would go through but then disconnect immediately after I picked up and I would get billed for them. Basically, my experience calling China was that the service was totally unreliable and a bit expensive (by expensive I mean I was unhappy being billed for dropped calls).

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#36

Post by adityakothadiya »

AlexMuir wrote: post #11

Absolutely agree that Tropo is better than Twilio. Here are my reasons: 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 a…

I'm not sure why you're saying it's cheaper. As Danielle mentioned, the prices are actually very less. And as a developer, every penny difference counts. Also they give $30 credit, which is more than enough to "try and play" and release your app to production.

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.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#37

Post by akalsey »

ericb wrote: post #31

I was looking at creating an IVR monitoring tool. I would like to 1-make a call every hour, 2-record the response, and ideally 3-verify the response matches the expected. Thoughts? It looks like twilio and tropi might be able to do this (although I wasn't sure they weren't more focused on inbound), but the 1 cent price is prohibitive for what people might pay per-month especially at higher monitoring frequencies. Any…

NuGram makes a product designed for just that. You could certainly build something yourself using either a hosted service like Tropo or using Asterisk, but using something purpose built may work better. We use NuGram to test things.

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.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#38

Post by frankdenbow »

adityakothadiya wrote: post #36
AlexMuir wrote: post #11

Absolutely agree that Tropo is better than Twilio. Here are my reasons: 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 a…

I'm not sure why you're saying it's cheaper. As Danielle mentioned, the prices are actually very less. And as a developer, every penny difference counts. Also they give $30 credit, which is more than enough to "try and play" and release your app to production. 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,…

On point #3, you can set the outgoing caller id to the user's phone number after you verify it by posting to the OutgoingCallerIds List Resource: http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/2010-04-01/rest/outgoing-call...

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.

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#39

Post by HectorRamos »

danielle17 wrote: post #28
ra wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Twilio, and I hadn't heard of Tropo. 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 there's anything we can do to make your Twilio experience better, I hope you'll email me, I'm danielle@twilio.com

We've been experimenting with Twilio for the past few months, have some proofs of concepts up and running, but in the end it seems like we will launch with Tropo instead. We're based in Puerto Rico, which even though is technically in the US, we can't get local numbers through Twilio. It also helps that Tropo has TTS in spanish and other languages.

Would really love to see Twilio match Tropo in these regards eventually!

Re: Why choose Tropo over Twilio

#40

Post by [deleted] »

akalsey wrote: post #37
ericb wrote: post #31

I was looking at creating an IVR monitoring tool. I would like to 1-make a call every hour, 2-record the response, and ideally 3-verify the response matches the expected. Thoughts? It looks like twilio and tropi might be able to do this (although I wasn't sure they weren't more focused on inbound), but the 1 cent price is prohibitive for what people might pay per-month especially at higher monitoring frequencies. Any…

NuGram makes a product designed for just that. You could certainly build something yourself using either a hosted service like Tropo or using Asterisk, but using something purpose built may work better. We use NuGram to test things. 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.

[deleted]
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