Ryan Boswell [dot] com

Twilio and OpenVBX

June 30th

Earlier this week I heard about OpenVBX when my hosting provider, DreamHost, enabled it for a one-click install. Reading about it in their monthly newsletter, I got curious about it and decided to check it out. Loyal readers will remember my obsession with Google Voice and it’s potential as a phone system for large groups. OpenVBX, with Twilio, is just that, a self-hosted Google Voice for businesses and organizations.

Twilio is the under-lying service, much like a standard Google Voice. What makes it really powerful is the ability to use its API to control what happens to incoming calls and SMS. Google Voice is great for consumers, especially since it’s mostly free (intl. calls cost $). But for people or groups that want an easy to use and powerful phone system, Twilio paired with OpenVBX is the answer, at least until Google finally gets around to adding Voice to their Apps offerings.

I downloaded and installed OpenVBX on my own servers to test out. Twilio offers trial accounts that come with $30 in credit and a sandbox phone number to test out your applications before you decide to upgrade and start paying for your own number. OpenVBX is just a web application that accesses the Twilio API and provides a drop-dead-simple interface for configuring what happens when people call or text your number.

Through OpenVBX, you can setup different user-accounts for everyone in your business or organization, and they can add their own numbers into the system to use as forwarding phones. Administrators can then add users to different groups (Sales, Support, etc.). Each user also has an inbox that stores any SMS or Voicemail messages that are available to them (either personally or through a group they are in).

In the call flow editor you can add endpoints to call a specific person or group, and the system rings all of the associated phones until someone picks up. You can further customize and app various applets to the call flow through a very simple, drag-and-drop interface. There is a SMS flow counterpart to handle incoming text messages to your number.

The one drawback I see so far in OpenVBX, is that there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to integrate any kind of dynamic information into the call flow, such as a listing of groups in the company. But there is very likely a way to do this through a plugin to OpenVBX. There is a plugin directory on the OpenVBX website, and while it is small now, I imagine that in a few months there will be dozens of plugins to provide integration and more features to the base system.

In addition to plugins, OpenVBX also supports themes, which allows for custom branding and design, so you can further integrate OpenVBX with whatever other internal systems your business or organization may have.

Twilio, as a service, is remarkably well-done. It’s a very simple, but powerful service. And best of all, it’s relatively cheap for small to medium businesses and organizations. It costs you $1 per month for each local phone number and $.03 per minute for outbound calls and SMS (inbound or outbound). If you want to use a toll free number it’s $2 per month and $.05 per minute. International calls cost a little bit more, but still not expensive for the most part.

Update: One thing I can’t believe I didn’t mention about Twilio is that they also offer voicemail transcription for $.05 per minute. In my testing and usage so far, it’s about on par with Google Voice’s transcription service. It gets most everything right, but there’s still a few mixups. Obviously, voice-to-text technology is still in it’s relative infancy, and even within the next few months it will no doubt improve dramatically.

Disclaimer: After posting this writeup, one of the Twilio employees offered me a $100 service credit as thanks for my praise of the service (see the first comment below). Since I had no connection to Twilio before writing this, I accepted the offer. And this also doesn’t mean that if I find problems that I won’t not talk about them (and I’m sure they would love to hear about things they could improve anyway).