OpenVBX – A Web-Based Open Source Phone System for Business by Twilio | Hacker News Reader

OpenVBX – A Web-Based Open Source Phone System for Business by Twilio

openvbx.org

49 pointsnikolay11 comments

The interesting thing that stood out to me is seeing a product built by Twilio (even if it is open source and probably needs work to be fully business ready). I remember seeing before that Twilio explicitly won't build business products to not step on potential users (they just want to offer the API to build the apps). This seems like something that would definitely exist from a vendor.

Most platform providers can't/don't resist the temptation to clone the most lucrative apps built on their platform.

Amazon AWS is a great example of this to a pathological degree.

If this looks useful to you, you might also want to see Anveo and their visual call flow editor. The UI isn't quite as polished, but it's been around quite a while and has a lot of features and integration points. It's not open source...runs on Anveo's servers.

Couple of screenshots:

http://www.anveo.com/features/images/variable_sample1.png

http://www.anveo.com/features/images/callflowsample.png

Edit: No association with Anveo other than being a customer. There are very few services that provide a drag/drop IVR or call flow builder with very low end pricing, so I thought it worth mentioning.

I'm also a customer and sorely disappointed there is no API for the call flow. It'd be really neat to call my number, press some keys, enter a PIN, and add the caller ID to a huntgroup, for example.

but, can't do that. or anything else. must login and edit call flow manually. :(

Another Anveo customer here...

Have you looked at the Anveo API documentation: http://www.anveo.com/api.asp

Particularly Call Flow variables?

http://www.anveo.com/api.asp?code=apihelp_callflow_presetvar...

I'm just happy to see that development is picking back up. It was stagnant for a while, and I'm interested to see how quickly they iterate now.

Presumably there is deep reliance on Twilio's API. This makes it rather less attractive to everyone who isn't/doesn't want to be a Twilio customer.

Isolating the Twilio API the same way that many PHP apps isolate their database API would be a great move -- then other services could supply their adaptor library, and there would be a much wider base of people interested in developing and using it.

>>Presumably there is deep reliance on Twilio's API

There is, but the api itself uses fairly generically named, and well documented methods and arguments. Being that there's not really a industry standard, I don't see that they are deliberately trying for some kind of lock in.

The path to create an adapter for say, Plivo, seems clear enough.

So, how is different from the other two posts sent like... 5 years ago?!

OpenVBX 0.83 Released (openvbx.org) 1 point by dmor 2032 days ago | past | web | add to buffer

OpenVBX 0.77 Release (openvbx.org) 3 points by dmor 2105 days ago | past | web | 1 comment | add to buffer

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10223645

  "If a story hasn't had significant attention in about the
   last year, reposts are ok. That's been the policy for a
   while..."

Also probably worth mentioning that you work for Tropo, a Twilio competitor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10822982

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