There is a good pitch from Twilio here.
I just don’t get how they can do that with a website. How can you control a land line with a web browser?
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There is a good pitch from Twilio here.
I just don’t get how they can do that with a website. How can you control a land line with a web browser?
Short answer: magic butterflies.
Longer answer: Twilio isn’t actually controlling a phone line directly from the browser. There are a few layers between the browser and your phone. For outbound calls it works something like this:
For inbound calls, it works pretty much in reverse:
In each case, the magic butterflies represent a scalable cloud communications infrastructure that handles all the complicated telephony stuff required to send/receive calls and text messages so that you don’t have to worry about anything beyond GET, POST and XML, the stuff you’re used to working with every day as a web developer.
Overview of How Twilio Works for voice calls
Sending/Receiving SMS with Twilio
If you have any other questions about how it works, let me know. I work at Twilio 🙂