I've started using twilio.com for a new site. They offer a toll-free 866 number for $5/mo + $0.05/min. Now it's not a phone line or voicemail per se, but rather a service for programming phone features like an answering service, support ticket system, company directory, or anything else. You can forward calls onto any phone too, so they can connect with a real person as well.
I've also tied it into voicecloud.com so that any message that's left or support request from the phone is automatically transcribed into an email and into our support database along with the mp3 of the actual message. voicecloud.com does add another $20/mo to the cost, but now I never have to listen to messages which is a big plus for me.
Anyway, for $5/mo you can build a complete toll-free phone service in almost no time. I can't recommend it highly enough.
There was a post several days ago either here or on techmeme showing a conceptual system between twilio, voicecloud, SMS, etc. Since you've developed a system that clearly implements this would you happen to know more details of something like that. Are there any out of the box examples online that demonstrates the interoperability between this, or did you set it up from scratch?
The APIs look pretty straightforward, but if you have any further insight or resources on this integration it would be very helpful.
The integration really just happens in your script, it's very basic. When I receive a RecordingUrl parameter from Twilio, I just save the file (I'm using PHP, so file_get_contents() to get the file, and file_put_contents() to save it) then I give Voicecloud the link to the file using their API call. I use file_get_contents() for that as well, which returns an XML response, but since it's so simple and I'm only looking for a transaction # to reference, I just do a regex for it instead of parsing the XML. You need to save that # to your db so you can reference it again in the Voicecloud response script.
The Voicecloud response handler is equally simple: they call your script and pass it a transactionuid (the value saved in the last script) and a transcribed_text parameter. From there you can do whatever you want, like send it in an email or save it to your database.
The Voicecloud API isn't really completely setup right now though, so you have to work with their support team to get an API key and to give them your response handler URL. They have to input that stuff. One other thing is I initially ran into issues with Twilio's mp3 encoding not working with Voicecloud, but Voicecloud solved that for me and probably for anyone else too.
I've also tied it into voicecloud.com so that any message that's left or support request from the phone is automatically transcribed into an email and into our support database along with the mp3 of the actual message. voicecloud.com does add another $20/mo to the cost, but now I never have to listen to messages which is a big plus for me.
Anyway, for $5/mo you can build a complete toll-free phone service in almost no time. I can't recommend it highly enough.