FWIW we're not totally over the moon with Twilio, and I've since discovered freeswitch, which is much more developer friendly and scalable than asterisk.
It's all but persuaded me to roll our own telco connectivity.
We've been experimenting with Twilio for the past few months, have some proofs of concepts up and running, but in the end it seems like we will launch with Tropo instead. We're based in Puerto Rico, which even though is technically in the US, we can't get local numbers through Twilio. It also helps that Tropo has TTS in spanish and other languages.
Would really love to see Twilio match Tropo in these regards eventually!
Hey Hector, thanks for this feedback I'll check with the team on the status of Puerto Rico phone numbers. Regarding TTS, you might want to take a closer look at the Twilio <Say> verb, we actually support Spanish TTS... you just have to specify the language and you'll get the right accent, like this:
<Response>
<Say language="es">Es un robot que hablan español!</Say>
</Response>
Thanks for the followup - I'll check this out. I'm not sure how Tropo got the PR numbers, as Google Voice and Skype have the same issue - something about the local telecoms.
If anyone at Twilio needs help when dealing with the PR numbers/needs telecom contact info/whatever, send me an email to anything @ my username dot com
Thank you! We are working our actual and virtual asses of to make Tropo the best developer platform for all communications applications (not just voice and sms: also IM, Twitter, telephony-in-web-clients, etc). We are also working hard to get the word out!
It's a shame, because it is pretty great. I think the word is finally getting out now, though.