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Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

onair.io

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Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#91

Post by Twistyfiasco »

LorenDB wrote: post #59
AndrewVos wrote: post #53

Looks good, I want to give it a try next week. Appear.in (now called https://whereby.com/ ) used to have the same functionality and I would just share my link everywhere so that team members could call me whenever they wanted. Although, Facetime is kind of the exact same thing isn’t it?

This may come as a surprise to you, but there are plenty of us who don't have Apple devices to use FaceTime with. OK, I do have a Mac Mini for development purposes, but I don't want to have to drag it out of storage just to make a call.

Apple users can send a facetime link that is usable on non-apple devices.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#92

Post by dredmorbius »

Twistyfiasco wrote: post #90
SoftTalker wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, my reluctance to use the phone is that 90% of the phone calls I get are spams/scams or to put it most kindly, unsolicited. I have just developed a visceral dislike for answering phone calls. My phone is set only to ring if you're in my contacts list. Everone else goes to voicemail (I guess -- I never set it up and I never check it). When I was young we had a landline at home and yes there were some telemarket…

How do you handle calls from unknowns like Doctors, hospitals or clinics?

Tell them to leave a message.

The problem runs the other direction as well. Friends in the US tell me that the local hospital no longer permits direct calls to rooms, on account of both robocalls and spams. It's now necessary to call through the operator.

This is a (slight) inconvenience to friends and family, and a considerable workload and staffing burden for the hospital.

I've been predicting the death of telephony, as in a universal direct-contact, single-directory (as in: everyone has an identifier which can be reached by any other party regardless of provider) for about a decade now. It's a death-by-a-thousand-cuts phenomenon, but increasingly it's difficult or impossible to reach specific individuals or organisations by phone. The issue isn't just landlines (used by a minority of households in many states, though some such as New York are apparently still above 50%, contrast all public switch telephone networks.

Expect a fragmentation to various online services (FB, WhatsApp, Google, Skype, Zoom), home-rolled networks, and those who just opt out fully.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#93

Post by SoftTalker »

Twistyfiasco wrote: post #90
SoftTalker wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, my reluctance to use the phone is that 90% of the phone calls I get are spams/scams or to put it most kindly, unsolicited. I have just developed a visceral dislike for answering phone calls. My phone is set only to ring if you're in my contacts list. Everone else goes to voicemail (I guess -- I never set it up and I never check it). When I was young we had a landline at home and yes there were some telemarket…

How do you handle calls from unknowns like Doctors, hospitals or clinics?

Fortunately I've had very little need to receive calls like this but I would ask them what number they will be calling from and add that as a contact.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#95

Post by toast0 »

collingreen wrote: post #64
the_sleaze_ wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course all points are correct - and yet > nearly half [of gen z] admit that speaking on the phone makes them feel anxious (49 per cent) > an awkward phone call is one of the top three things they would most want to avoid (42 per cent) That being said I'm quite confident there is enough of a market that doesn't dread talking on the phone that this company could do very well for itself and its founders financial goa…

I wonder how this will change as it becomes more and more normal for companies to shunt you to horrible chatbots. Maybe we'll shift back to needing a real human.

I mean, if you need a human, you need a human. But the companies where you seem to need humans to help make it hard to reach them, by phone or in writing.

I prefer in writing, because I always hope that when it eventually gets to a human, they can read the whole conversation and save a lot of time. Using voice, almost always, I have to repeat the information to each person as we go, and it's tiresome.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#97

Post by klabetron »

Twistyfiasco wrote: post #91
LorenDB wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may come as a surprise to you, but there are plenty of us who don't have Apple devices to use FaceTime with. OK, I do have a Mac Mini for development purposes, but I don't want to have to drag it out of storage just to make a call.

Apple users can send a facetime link that is usable on non-apple devices.

Which I suppose is a failure of marketing by Apple? If casual non-Apple readers of HN don’t know the links work for non-Apple devices, no one does :)

(I’m an Apple reader of HN and I didn’t know this either!)

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#98

Post by TylerE »

cjmcqueen wrote: post #77

People are weird and sometimes things don't make sense from their existing framing. What if the URL was OnAir.com/555-555-5555 <~ basically make it look like a phone number and make it something where people can see they can text, call, or message. If you're live, it shows that. If you're not live, it gives you a way to leave a message. The interaction is almost exactly the same, but might create less friction of "wh…

I strongly feel this should NOT be allowed, at least unless you can prove ownership of that number in the real world. Else you'll have scammers registering the number of every bank and airline in no time flat.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#99

Post by touggourt »

Did you think to market it to small bricks and mortar shops ? You know, these little companies where customers ask for advises. I work with some of them. They often use one phone only for personal and professional calls. Further, they don't have strict separation between work and family things. If you could add some automation like detecting when the phone is quickly moving (you are in a car, a train, a bike…), or when the phone is not at the workplace it could help them a lot.

Re: Show HN: OnAir – create link, receive calls

#100

Post by cess11 »

mfkp wrote: post #82
cess11 wrote: post #58

Is it built with Ruby? Looks like the landing and login page are. Should probably consider moving to Elixir, if that's not what you're using on the server already.

What's wrong with ruby in this case? Ruby in 2024 can easily handle an app like this.

Let's flip the question. What is it that Ruby does better than Elixir for this domain?

I can't think of anything. One could argue that Ruby might have a larger package repo to pull in dependencies from, but this being a telecom adjacent domain you'll find that Elixir and OTP solves some tricky problems rather well that mainly object oriented languages tend to struggle with.

You'd also get out of having to skip between your application language and Golang down in Livekit, since the Membrane folks have built a standalone WebRTC platform: https://github.com/elixir-webrtc

In production Ruby code bases also tends to degrade over time. The team will sometimes find itself under duress and push magic tricks that Ruby allows to prod. Perhaps it's a matter of taste or whatever, but I've found most of the Rails applications I've come across somewhat hard to learn and debug. Similar to annotation driven applications in Java things can get really weird and brittle. These things are harder to accomplish in Elixir, which also seems to get a rather clever gradual typing system.

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