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Hi, I don't speak for Twilio but as a developer I've used their system quite a bit in the past and enjoyed it lots. Haven't yet used Tropo, but I think it's really interesting. Sorry for necroposting, but I just found this via search. Twilio isn't indefinitely free for developing like Tropo, but they do give you $30 credit when you sign up, which goes a long way towards pre-production testing. Twilio can do international outbound calls, but as you say they don't yet have international inbound. Twilio and Tropo both have a REST API. The main difference here is that you reply to Twilio with XML and Tropo uses JSON. Although proprietary, either one is easier to use than VoiceXML IMO. Tropo has an amazing number of nice voices you can use to read off text to the caller. Twilio has just "male" and "female", last time I checked. On the other hand, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see where Tropo could play an MP3 to the caller, whereas there are lots of ways to play recorded music or messages to the caller with Twilio. As far as recording, you have to give Tropo a place to send recordings, whereas Twilio will store the recordings for you. Twilio also has tons of API methods to access data, like list all your recordings, call logs, and so on. I don't see that for Tropo. Hmm, this is getting long. I think a comparison blog post is in order. I love the fact that there are at least two smart, highly motivated companies in this space. I hope Twilio and Tropo push each other to greatness. |
And you can store the recordings on Tropo -- your Tropo app space has FTP and WebDAV credentials, so you can tell your app to FTP it to Tropo's webhosting. We don't want to store your recording forever, but fell free to use it for short-term recordings.