[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Telephone notification: Twilio

[Josh Stompro]

Hello,  Back in Feb 2008 there were a couple messages by Bill Ott and 
Niles Ingalls about telephone notification.
http://markmail.org/message/ja22gm3tvgvqxk5t
http://markmail.org/message/cm45uy2g2waxxvo7

I'm curious if any progress has been made in this area.

Has anyone else looked into using the twilio service for phone 
notification?  (I'm going to sound like an infomercial now.)
http://www.twilio.com/
 From their web site "Twilio provides a web-service API for businesses 
to build scalable, reliable communications apps that make and receive 
phone calls."

Some of the features that sound beneficial about this service are:
  Cost, 3 cents a minute to make outgoing calls.  3cents a minute for 
local incoming calls, 5c for a toll free number.
  They will spoof callerid for you, so you can make the calls seem to 
come from any number you have control of.  So each call can seem to come 
from a users home library, so when someone tries to call back they will 
get the correct location.
  Unlimited number of concurrent calls, so if you want to call 300 
customers at 5:30pm, all at the same time, you can.  You could ask 
customers what time exactly to call, and always call them at that time.  
No need to worry about number of phone lines, etc.  Of course each call 
checks back with your server for instructions, so you web server would 
need to be able to handle 300 connections.

Could also be used to automate phone renewals and other functions.  Has 
a voice recording feature, along with voice transcription which could be 
used in interesting ways.

They have an example of creating a appointment reminder application 
which is close to what might be wanted in a Library setting.
http://www.twilio.com/docs/howto/appointmentreminder

REST API for making calls, has info on how Twilio handles answering 
machines.
http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/2008-08-01/rest/making_calls

Place a call from the shell.  I thought this was pretty cool.
http://labs.twilio.com/bash/
This command would call the number referenced, read the message echoed 
to it, and hand control over to another URL if wanted.
Echo "Your item is ready to be picked up at the Moorhead Library, please 
pickup your item by Nov 06." | ./twilio-call 218-555-1234

(End infomercial)

Does anyone know of other competitors that might also offer similar 
services?
Thanks
Josh