I’ve been building commercial phone/voice/SMS applications for companies for years. 3 years ago it took a large investment in proprietary software, hardware, and complicated service agreements with the big telcos to do this.

Today companies like Twilio and Plivo are growing by leaps and bounds because they’ve turned voice into a an easy to implement API. This kind of technology isn’t new at all, it’s actually how most of the really expensive carrier grade IVR platforms I worked on functioned. What is new is that it’s now accessible to anyone for just a few bucks per month. Now that these types of services are available to the public at large at a very low cost there isn’t a need for the old guard of VoIP providers and “hosted PBX” companies anymore. So why are they still in business? Because at the surface it seems really complicated to implement phone APIs and counter intuitive to say you can build the same voice services these companies are charging a 900% markup for in one afternoon and a few bucks.

That’s why I moved to consulting and wrote Building Phone Applications. I know that there’s a better, more affordable, and honestly cooler way to solve these kinds of business problems. There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be doing this for your company. In this book I will show you from the ground up how to leverage the latest VoIP technology, services and tools to create your own phone platform that does what you want, is infinitely customizable, and has virtually no cost whatsoever check it out and let me know what you think.

This book includes 19 tutorials and example code that show you step-by-step how to leverage voice and SMS, using the Plivo API and some basic PHP.

Here’s what I cover…

Section One

Companies with a phone number get more business. – An analysis and guide on using voice and SMS applications to beat your competition and delight your customers.

Section Two Hands on tutorials and full code examples of interactive voice and SMS applications, integrating voice and SMS into your existing applications, and building better customer experience and growing trust through voice services. In each tutorial I will explain the application, provide the code with detailed explanations, and finally show why it works.Step by Step examples including:

• Two Factor Authentication with Voice interaction.
• Two Factor Authentication with SMS one time passwords.
• Two Factor Authentication with interactive SMS login approval.
• Marketing Automation by integrating MailChimp and SMS.
• Interactive Voice Response platform for customer support
• Virtual number service, create a Google Voice system.
• Conference Bridge with proactive reminders and scheduling.
• Appointment scheduling and reminders system integrating with Google Calendar.
• A complete small business PBX platform that powers SIP phones.

Section Three

Building a resilient phone platform using Plivo, Digital Ocean, and DNS. I explain the Plivo cloud service in comparison to the Plivo opensource project and highlight some of the key differences between Plivo and the other Voice API services.