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Twilio like service based on open source telephony solutions?

Well it’s been a while since my last post.

I’ve been fooling around again with Twilio over the past few days, and I must admit that the guys over there are doing a great job to get telephony on the cloud. However I’ve been wondering….

How difficult would it be to create a Twilio like service based on opensource telephony solutions? (Say asterisk, opensips etc). I’ve already created for a customer in the past, a dynamic IVR system based on asterisk, that on each step/user action, it would ask an application layer, on what to do next. You set up small extensions that could do simple tasks such as, get digits, playback a file, answer, hangup, record, and route the actions based on a separate application logic. The application logic is removed from the asterisk dialplan and moved to a separate layar that knows the current state and controls the call flow.

I’ve already created web services to initiate a call, report back statuses, to bridge one or more channel, so putting them all together wouldn’t be that difficult!

Even further, nowadays we are living the era of node.js, redis with it’s excellent publish/subscribe features, messagepack, etc maybe an application like this could be even further extended to do the most amazing stuff. (Imagine a node.js server infront of an asterisk)

What do you think?

Posted in Telephony.

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2 Responses

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  1. Sam says

    Have you looked at Plivo (http://www.plivo.com)? Don’t know if it relying on Freeswitch rather than Asterisk is a problem for you but it looks promising. Going to have a play with it over the next couple of days to see how it performs.

  2. mobius says

    Hi Sam,

    I’ve seen it but never used it yet. Would love to hear your comments on it after you’ve used it.



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