What software or service can I use to programatically make phone calls with?

Question

I'm looking to programatically make phone call reminders to customers based upon their opt-in requests. I am NOT a telemarketer.

I need to make a phone call, and play a message. I need to leave a message after the beep if an answering machine or voicemail is detected. I need to know if the message was successfully delivered.

Ideally, I could offer the user feedback by pressing a button and recording their selection.

I prefer Windows and .NET but would consider anything.

What do you suggest?

Answer 1

Hi,

You should look at Glorsoft's Velocity software (www.glorsoft.com). It's for .NET programmers who don't necessarilly know anything about IVR's. All the hard work is done for you. The SDK is free.

It's written using .NET. There's no COM or TAPI involved. They are both old technologies and it doesn't make sense to start writing a new application using old technologies.

There's more information about this on Glorsoft's website.

Declaration: I work for Glorsoft but this answer is accurate and hopefully helpful.

Eoghan.

Answer 2

You don't mention the necessary call volume.

If you are looking into single, one at a time calls, consider using a voice modem. They aren't great, but they are cheap.

Next step might be solutions from Digium.

If you are getting into high volume outbound dialing, look at IVR hosting providers. For example, TellMe and Voxeo.

In each of these categories, there are a variety of players. Some of the trade-offs not related to volume that you may want to consider:

• Do you need to manage the dialing/retry list or does the product/service do it
• What kind of output/reporting do you need
• Are you playing a consistent clip or does it vary per customer (note, there are some services that will just make calls to a dialing list and play a recording. And, yes, most of those are aimed at telemarketers and very high volumes).
• Do you need to support international or just domestic calls
• Is this a one time opportunity or something you'll need on a regular basis

Answer 3

You should try a product called Velocity from Glorsoft. www.glorsoft.com It is a .Net DLL and works really well. You will need a Dialogic board or Dialogic HMP. You can pick these up cheap on eBay.

You can also look at a company called Eurovoice. There's is a Com based toolkit. www.eurovoice.co.uk - they use Dialogic and Pika boards.

There is also CT ADE which is now owned by Syntellect.

There are lots of other tools available to you but these are the ones I am most familiar with.

In my experience I wouldn't waste any time on TAPI or Voice Modems.

Answer 4

http://www.twilio.com/ is awesome.

Answer 5

Hi Jason, If you're looking to develop in .NET, give VBVoice by Pronexus a try. It's a .NET GUI-based toolkit. The tool combines an easy-to-use visual call flow environment, with fully programmable controls. You can leverage familiar programming skills in industry-standard languages such as VB.NET, C# and other languages supported by Visual Studio .NET.

You can try it out for free to see how you like it: http://pronexus.com/english/view.asp?x=486

Or you can contact me to try the enhanced evaluation (for free of course) which gives you full functionality of the software.

Good luck with your project!

Answer 6

Hi Jason, I hope you will take a look at Twilio. Our REST API and TwiML make it very easy to make outbound calls programmatically with any language that can output XML. We've got some sample code for voice broadcast that you might find useful: http://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/broadcast

Regarding .NET, you might want to check out some of the work John Sheehan has done with Twilio. Robert McLaws has also written a Twilio .NET library you may want to check out. (Both are Google-able, just started this account so not enough rep point to post multiple links yet)

In full disclosure, John is so awesome we recently hired him to become a developer evangelist for Twilio.

Cheers - Danielle @ Twilio