Lookup by Twilio
twilio.com
Lookup by Twilio
1–10 of 78 posts
Re: Lookup by Twilio
#2Although I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a "Twilio dev" I do implement the service whenever I need to spin up some sort of easy SMS functionality.
That said, any ideas for what you could use this for? I'm actually interested in building a sample app for it, I'm just trying to think of a sexier use case than localization and spam-detection. Is that as good as it gets?
Re: Lookup by Twilio
#3My telco was charging $8/month for visual voicemail, so I opted to buy a Twilio number for $1/month, and set my phone to forward no answer/busy/unavailable to a simple Twilio app I wrote that handles voicemail.
When someone leaves me a message, I get an SMS with the message and caller details. I've been using OpenCNAM (https://www.opencnam.com) for the caller ID look-up.
I implemented something similar for our office so that each person has a proxy number that can be given out to clients. Voicemail is handled by a similar app, and each person also receives a Slack notification for an incoming call or voice message.
Lookup by Twilio is a bit different than OpenCNAM, but also pretty similar. They're both pretty affordable, though in the end, I'll likely create our own lookup database that we can customize.
For me, the most immediately useful info is the state/province as well as country of the incoming call. It appears that with Twilio Local, on the latter comes through. I did some tests of Lookup with a bunch of numbers, and the additional info that comes through for the paid portion of things doesn't seem that particularly useful. The (free) "national_format" is nice, but I'd say the most valuable part of the service is quickly identifying invalid and VoIP-based numbers.
Re: Lookup by Twilio
#4Although I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a "Twilio dev" I do implement the service whenever I need to spin up some sort of easy SMS functionality. That said, any ideas for what you could use this for? I'm actually interested in building a sample app for it, I'm just trying to think of a sexier use case than localization and spam-detection. Is that as good as it gets?
Well... I need to find people who are using Google Voice as their 2 factor auth phone number and destroy them, this looks like it works well:
... "name": "Google (Grand Central) BWI" ...
Re: Lookup by Twilio
#5I find it interesting that you can get the mobile carrier from this. The first thing I pictured was a voice phishing attack: "Hello, this is T-Mobile, there's a problem with your account..." you get the gist.
Re: Lookup by Twilio
#6Although I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm a "Twilio dev" I do implement the service whenever I need to spin up some sort of easy SMS functionality. That said, any ideas for what you could use this for? I'm actually interested in building a sample app for it, I'm just trying to think of a sexier use case than localization and spam-detection. Is that as good as it gets?
I can see good use for it.
"Some number types don’t accept all communications -- for example, most landline numbers and many VoIP numbers do not accept SMS messages. Identify which kind of communications users can accept, based on their number type. This allows businesses to optimally decide whether to send voice or text communications for $0.005 per lookup" - from that page
When you type a landline number into my app that sends text messages it will fail. So I can choose to pay Twilio to confirm that the number can receive SMS. My users have mistyped their numbers in the past and that can be awkward when some random stranger gets a text from my system in the middle of the night.
That being said, they would charge me half a cent per lookup. I probably won't bother with local numbers, but I think I will use this for international numbers.
Additionally, since Twilio is giving me national format preference data for free, I might as well reformat a user's entered number to match their usual preference as eye candy. Although, I will just use http://www.phoneformat.com/ JavaScript library like I planned since I want to auto-format numbers as they are typed.
If you are making a site like Craigslist and want to enforce phone verification for making new accounts, you can require that users use a cell phone number instead of easily obtainable VoIP numbers. Craigslist implemented something like this in-house.
Another good use is now you can see if the robocall you received originated from a Twilio number. I looked up my Twilio numbers and they show up as "Twilio" under carrier. The page is live, so you can lookup numbers for free. You can then file a ticket with Twilio and make that person's life miserable.
Re: Lookup by Twilio
#7I find it interesting that you can get the mobile carrier from this. The first thing I pictured was a voice phishing attack: "Hello, this is T-Mobile, there's a problem with your account..." you get the gist.
Easy enough to do already. Twilio doesn't need to implement this in order to make this interesting.
Not much different than looking up someone's whois and pretending to be GoDaddy.
Re: Lookup by Twilio
#8Wish they returned city, state, and ZIP information for domestic numbers like Telesign does. Telesign is outrageously expensive.
Re: Lookup by Twilio
#9I find it interesting that you can get the mobile carrier from this. The first thing I pictured was a voice phishing attack: "Hello, this is T-Mobile, there's a problem with your account..." you get the gist.
Easy enough to do already. Twilio doesn't need to implement this in order to make this interesting. Not much different than looking up someone's whois and pretending to be GoDaddy.
The sort of person who registers a domain might be a little more alert than the larger group of people who have a mobile phone?
Re: Lookup by Twilio
#10Wish they returned city, state, and ZIP information for domestic numbers like Telesign does. Telesign is outrageously expensive.
Hey Jon - Rob from Twilio here.
Good feedback - appreciate you sharing. We do have geographic information with each webhook sharing city, state and zip - agree it would be useful to have this in the Lookup resources as well.