Show HN: Callr – Never miss another call | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Callr – Never miss another call

getcallr.com

10 pointsdotmike8 comments

I've been using Callr for almost a month now, after it was mentioned by a friend who helped build the service. Since I have 2-4 conference calls per day, with different bridge lines and access codes (and some where I'm host, some where I'm guest), I thought the service wouldn't be able to cope with the complexity.

But after a couple support requests, I have things set up now to the point where Callr calls me about 30 seconds before any regular meeting I'm in is scheduled to begin, without fail.

It's a very nice service, and I'm amazed that it can parse out the information from all my calendar events.

The one thing that it can't really help with at this point is getting data about meeting invites that are spur-of-the-moment (e.g. someone invites me to a meeting that starts in 10 minutes). Since Callr pampers me by not requiring me to do any dialing, it's annoying to have to pull out my phone and dial in to those meetings manually.

I don't join any conference calls and hate being interrupted by the phone, but I can see how this would be really useful for people who need it. Great idea.

The site is neatly but not over-designed and clearly explained the proposition which is something a lot of startups struggle to do well. I didn't have to watch a video or read buckets of text.

My one suggestion would be to revise this paragraph while you're US only:

"No matter what conference call service you use, Callr can connect you. There is no need to get a new number or fancy URL.*"

The asterisked footnote demotes the "no matter what" making it seem like a clear exaggeration. Perhaps have "We support popular US conference call services without the need to get a new number or fancy URL. (If you're outside the US, get in touch and we'll let you know when we expand!)"

Thank you so much for the thoughtful response, prawn. Great suggestions and we'll make changes.

I think there's something I'm missing about it. Usually, the most annoying part about 'important calls' is that they won't exactly be right on time & you'll have to wait starring at your phone for a couple of minutes. I don't see how this solve that problem.

rhaco31, you are right. Callr, in its current form, solves the first big pain point which is remembering when your calls are and dialing them in. If it's a conference call with long PIN, it becomes really handy as well.

For the scenario you mentioned, the hope is the other party will start using Callr as well so that s/he will be on time. We built a 'Share the Love' feature so that our users can show them the light :-)

Does this adequately answers your question?

Oh, I guess I didn't dig enough in how it does actually work. So I have two new questions :

- Do you need to format your calendar events in a certain way for Callr to understand them & extract number/PIN? Looking at my actual confcall entries, not two have the same format and most of them have tons of different numbers depending of the country (the one I'm looking at atm has 10 different phone numbers in the calendar entry for instance)

- How do you address the privacy problem of having to upload your whole business calendar to your server? Imho that would be forbidden in most places.

Not a problem; here are the answers

1. No, you do not need to format your calendar in any special way. We've developed a machine learning algorithm that automatically figures out the correct phone number and PIN number (if available). It works in 99.98% of the cases. In those rare cases that it misses, Callr will ask the user for a feedback and adjusts the algorithm based on that input.

2. There are a couple of important points; Callr only looks at a few days worth of events at a time and we did that by design. This will ensure that Callr does not have more information than it actually needs. Once the data is pulled, Callr is built like a fortress; we encrypt it with AES-256 to make sure it's fully locked. We wrote about clearly on our privacy page: http://www.getcallr.com/privacy-policy/

instead of using above service use spoof call for anonymous call

http://haktuts.com/how-to-change-your-caller-id-1/

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