My telco was charging $8/month for visual voicemail, so I opted to buy a Twilio number for $1/month, and set my phone to forward no answer/busy/unavailable to a simple Twilio app I wrote that handles voicemail.
When someone leaves me a message, I get an SMS with the message and caller details. I've been using OpenCNAM (https://www.opencnam.com) for the caller ID look-up.
I implemented something similar for our office so that each person has a proxy number that can be given out to clients. Voicemail is handled by a similar app, and each person also receives a Slack notification for an incoming call or voice message.
Lookup by Twilio is a bit different than OpenCNAM, but also pretty similar. They're both pretty affordable, though in the end, I'll likely create our own lookup database that we can customize.
For me, the most immediately useful info is the state/province as well as country of the incoming call. It appears that with Twilio Local, on the latter comes through. I did some tests of Lookup with a bunch of numbers, and the additional info that comes through for the paid portion of things doesn't seem that particularly useful. The (free) "national_format" is nice, but I'd say the most valuable part of the service is quickly identifying invalid and VoIP-based numbers.
Thanks for the opencnam mention. We are about to launch www.everyoneapi.com -- version 2. The current everyoneapi offers the same lookups that Twilio offers, but we will be lowering our price and adding even more data-points. Our reverse phone append product offers a lot more than just linetype and carrier. The parent company to both opencnam and everyoneapi is telo (www.telo.com). If anyone has any questions or requests, feel free to contact [email protected]!
A Slack notification is a great idea. I just have the Voicemail Twimlet set up for my personal numbers but I've been wanting something more sophisticated for awhile. Thanks for the ideas, and the OpenCNAM link.
I worked on a very similar project a few years back, but without lookup and with an altogether different (physical) interface: http://iamsaul.co.uk/projects/message-box/
For the same reasons ($1/month<<$8/month, even though it means I burn a precious NANPA DID), I've set up the same without writing a single line of code.
With VOIP.ms, I ordered a DID and set it to auto-answer any call. They have a voicemail feature you can use, so it handles the recorded message and recording after the beep. Voip.ms then emails you the voicemail (nice for recordkeeping). If your cellular provider has an email to SMS gateway, you can forward the email there, and you'll see the callerid in the subject, but no CNAM to speak of.
Once working, I set my cellphone to auto-direct any unanswered calls to the DID I setup.
When someone leaves me a message, I get an SMS with the message and caller details. I've been using OpenCNAM (https://www.opencnam.com) for the caller ID look-up.
I implemented something similar for our office so that each person has a proxy number that can be given out to clients. Voicemail is handled by a similar app, and each person also receives a Slack notification for an incoming call or voice message.
Lookup by Twilio is a bit different than OpenCNAM, but also pretty similar. They're both pretty affordable, though in the end, I'll likely create our own lookup database that we can customize.
For me, the most immediately useful info is the state/province as well as country of the incoming call. It appears that with Twilio Local, on the latter comes through. I did some tests of Lookup with a bunch of numbers, and the additional info that comes through for the paid portion of things doesn't seem that particularly useful. The (free) "national_format" is nice, but I'd say the most valuable part of the service is quickly identifying invalid and VoIP-based numbers.