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Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Yes, I do have some of the Twilio SIMs but I live in a verizon-only zone so ...

Interesting how you are sending SMS with different caller-ID based on contacts, but I am curious - without a VOIP dialer, can you place voice calls from your native dialer with different caller ID ?

Please, please email (or trouble ticket) twilio and ask them to add an "email" verb to twiml ...

That is one of the big missing links in all of this - you should be able to fire off email alerts/messages in your twiml workflow without any third-party[1] integration or other accounts/logins, etc.

[1] I would still consider sendgrid third party since I need a different login, account, etc.

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> Interesting how you are sending SMS with different caller-ID based on contacts, but I am curious - without a VOIP dialer, can you place voice calls from your native dialer with different caller ID ?

Yes it is not very pleasant, and it is how you basically described it where you call a Twilio number, and then type in the destination. You could set up some sort of signaling where you activate the outbound number with an SMS which may be less cumbersome than dialing on a phone call, but for native support that is the only way I can think of -- just dialing the target number would of course route from your main Telco

A decent SIP app might be an alternative here, I haven't explored them thoroughly because of Twilio Wireless (last I checked they weren't spectacular, but SIP is good)

Here is a possible way to call from the native dialer in the event that data is not available...

One can prepend a calling card-like sequence, using hard and soft pauses, before the actual telephone number gets called so all calls get routed through twilio (or any VoIP carrier) for managing the caller id.

In other words, you are calling your personal calling card telephone number for every call so you will enter in your code and then enter the telephone number that you would like to call.

"You could set up some sort of signaling where you activate the outbound number with an SMS ..."

Thanks - that is a great idea and I might consider implementing that ...

I think a SIP/VOIP app might be cleaner, and I see that some VOIP apps now support SMS, if I understand correctly ? Call quality and volume issues are a side-effect of the voip dialers, though ...

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