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Comment by ra | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Freeswitch rocks. Great stuff, from a great team too.

If you like Freeswitch, you'd probably like Tropo. Tropo lets you program directly in Javscript and other languages, just like Freeswitch.

Tropo also lets you roll your own. You can download Prism, which include the Tropo engine, here:

http://www.voxeo.com/prism/

I've been in the telephony for 15 years now. If I can help with your explorations at all, feel free to email me: jtaylor at voxeo dot com

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!

Hey Hector, thanks for this feedback I'll check with the team on the status of Puerto Rico phone numbers. Regarding TTS, you might want to take a closer look at the Twilio <Say> verb, we actually support Spanish TTS... you just have to specify the language and you'll get the right accent, like this:

<Response> <Say language="es">Es un robot que hablan español!</Say> </Response>

Also have French and Germain. Details here: http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/2010-04-01/twiml/say

Thanks for the followup - I'll check this out. I'm not sure how Tropo got the PR numbers, as Google Voice and Skype have the same issue - something about the local telecoms.

If anyone at Twilio needs help when dealing with the PR numbers/needs telecom contact info/whatever, send me an email to anything @ my username dot com

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