Verified by Twilio

I know it&#x27;s overkill, but this is my current setup for my phone numbers. I treat phone numbers the same way I do my email address: I use different numbers for different purposes.<p>1. I have a &quot;clean&quot; phone number I only share with friends&#x2F;family. Certain prefixes and phone number actually receive next to zero spam calls. This number has received 2 calls in the years I&#x27;ve had it.<p>2. I have a phone number I share with companies &#x2F; loyalty programs &#x2F; etc.<p>3. I have a legacy phone number I&#x27;ve had for 10 years that receives multiple spam calls daily. For this number I&#x27;ve set up an incoming handler that uses Google Cloud to ask the caller a simple question (What is five plus two?), parses with the Speech Recognition API, and forwards calls with the correct answer. The rest go to voicemail. It&#x27;s better to use the speech recognition API than it is to ask the caller to press a DTMF tone, in case they are in a car or are calling from a device without a telephone keypad. If I every need to, I&#x27;ll add this protection to use numbers 1) and 2).<p>4. I have a number that rings straight to voicemail.<p>All numbers use the Whitepages and Nomorobo APIs from Twilio. These score the &quot;spamminess&quot; of calls. Calls with sufficiently high values are forwarded to voicemail.<p>For incoming calls, I set the caller ID for the calls to my SIP clients to indicate which number is being called, and include the spam score.

Just what we need, another startup injecting themselves into our lives. And then for the right price, &quot;acceptable robocalls&quot; can be Verified by Twilio™!<p>SHAKEN&#x2F;STIR[1] is a much more network-agnostic solution to the same problem, using essentially the same, well-established technology used by internet certificate authorities. As such, it has all the same basic problems that CAs do, but it&#x27;s a hell of a lot better than tightly coupling yourself to Twilio.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adblock_Plus#Controversies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adblock_Plus#Controversies</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.consumerreports.org&#x2F;robocalls&#x2F;spoofed-robocalls-relief-is-on-the-way&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.consumerreports.org&#x2F;robocalls&#x2F;spoofed-robocalls-...</a>

I&#x27;m skeptical for the following reasons:<p>1. Companies like Twilio largely created the explosion in spam calls by providing extremely cheap, programmable calls, so I&#x27;m always a little skeptical when the company selling the poison is also selling the antidote. 2. I really don&#x27;t like the idea of a single company being responsible for a global verification system for something like phone calls. How are decisions made over what is verified (e.g. the example shows &quot;call purpose&quot; snippets on the screen - if I put something there saying &quot;I have an important flight update&quot;, but then my call is &quot;You&#x27;re only getting free peanuts on your flight, but if you enroll in this MileagePlus card you&#x27;ll get snack mix too!&quot; who judges that?)<p>Overall I&#x27;d just say with all the consolidation of power with US tech giants I am extremely wary of giving them anything else that could consolidate that power further. I would much prefer an open, federated model.

&gt; 70% of consumers don’t answer a call if the caller’s number is anonymous. While that might cut down the number of unwanted robocalls, it also potentially prevents consumers from receiving vital communications—calls from the doctor, banks that are flagging issues, schools calling about parents’ children.<p>A message to my doctor, bank, kids&#x27; school, etc: if you call me on a private&#x2F;unknown number and don&#x27;t leave a voicemail (because I can assure you that I am in that 70%) I will assume that you are spam. You don&#x27;t need Twilio for this, just some basic phone etiquette.

I was just reviewing my call detail records on my &quot;home&quot; number yesterday, and realizing that the vast majority are spam - we pretty much don&#x27;t answer that phone. This got me thinking about alternatives to even ringing for any unrecognised numbers, such as an IVR menu that said something like &quot;Hi, we&#x27;re screening spam, press 4 2 if you&#x27;re a real person&quot;. I&#x27;m not sure how that&#x27;d be accepted by, for example, the dentist office though. Has anyone set something like that up?<p>I really hope Twilio is successful with this - it would definitely help, so long as there&#x27;s a way to avoid abuse.<p>Just in case someone asks why I still have a &quot;landline&quot;: it&#x27;s VoIP, and I maintain it for basically two reasons:<p>* We use our VoIP number anytime we have to give a number out as part of signing up for something, rather than cell numbers<p>* It typically costs me under $25&#x2F;year, which is actually mostly the 911 fee (oh, and it&#x27;s an extra way to call 911, if we need to)

Well that&#x27;s cool I guess. But:<p>1. How are they partnering with all of the device companies to get this on at least most phones? That&#x27;d be interesting to know.<p>2. I guess somebody has to type that intro text. As long as they&#x27;re doing that, why bother with a normal call? How about just sending the text instead. Or send a text and let me call back for more details when it suits me, either right away or in 10 minutes. It sounds like whoever is sending these probably has a call center or somebody who&#x27;s job is to sit around and answer the phone when it rings.

I will install whatever app I need to get this service if it works as advertised. Well done and congrats to the team(s) that worked on this project. It&#x27;s a travesty that we need a private company to solve this problem, or even that the problem exists in the first place when we as a society could have legislated it away a while ago. However, a fix is a fix.

&gt; it also potentially prevents consumers from receiving vital communications—calls from the doctor, banks that are flagging issues, schools calling about parents’ children.<p>That&#x27;s bullshit. I have these important number in my address book. In the unlikely case the doctor wants to call me from a phone booth or from their friend&#x27;s phone (why?), they&#x27;ll leave a message and I&#x27;ll call them back. As for the bank, they know my e-mail and I asked them not to use the phone for communication anyway.<p>Really, for many people there is no reason to answer unknown calls at all, especially if their experience is that most of these is someone wanting to sell something to them. Not to mention in our times asynchronous communication is very important for mental health.

&gt; Even more concern, 70% of consumers don’t answer a call if the caller’s number is anonymous. While that might cut down the number of unwanted robocalls, it also potentially prevents consumers from receiving vital communications—calls from the doctor, banks that are flagging issues, schools calling about parents’ children.<p>I don&#x27;t understand how this helps with anonymous callers?

My phone is always on silent and I don&#x27;t pick up any calls except if its from my started contacts or if it&#x27;s a pre-scheduled meeting. I do check my phone every hour to see if there are any important missed calls. This has helped me so much from distractions and overall well being. It took me a while to realize that there is nothing that requires me to respond immediately and in case of emergency I shouldn&#x27;t be the one responding. There&#x27;s 911 for that.

With the new iOS beta allowing non recognized callers (not in address book) go straight to voice mail, I see little use for this service now than before.

&gt; Even more concern, 70% of consumers don’t answer a call if the caller’s number is anonymous.<p>The concerning part is 30% still answer the calls.

Interesting. Wonder if this is going to be a valuable public service in the long run. For sure the monetary incentive is for Twilio to operate this like an &quot;acceptable ads&quot; type shakedown [1], where companies pay Twilio to mark their calls as &quot;valuable information&quot; rather than spam.<p>Arguably this should be administered by some trusted third party, like EFF.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adblock_Plus#Controversies" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Adblock_Plus#Controversies</a>

Huh? &quot;We’re partnering with leading call identification apps&quot;<p>Are that those shady apps which require your address book access just to start, aren&#x27;t they?

Received this unsollicited pearl from Twilio subsidiary Sendgrid today:<p>Hi aithrow,<p>One of my special interests is Whitebox machine learning, and has been for many years<p>With the dominance of Blackbox techniques causing lots of ethical questions to be raised on the uses of AI, I think it&#x27;s time to revisit Whitebox techniques.<p>I’ve written a couple of non-technical articles on the subject on Medium:<p>Why, if you&#x27;re planning to use AI you need a Whitebox system<p>Why are tech firms ignoring half of AI?<p>If you want to read about our Whitebox solutions please look at darl.ai<p>Whitebox machine learning is available (free) through our GraphQL API at darl.dev<p>Thanks for reading,<p>Andy Edmonds Doctor Andy’s IP sales@darl.ai<p>P.S. A glitch in our mail handling software meant that a small number of unsubscribes were missed on our last mailshot. If you were one of these my apologies. Just unsubscribe again, we won’t miss you this time!<p>Sent by Dr Andy’s Back Office AI system<p>If you&#x27;d like to unsubscribe and stop receiving these emails click here .

I wonder how many of the spam calls are actually powered by Twilio? Is this an instance of a company trying to make money by getting paid by businesses on one hand to do spam calls, and getting paid by consumers on the other hand to block spam calls?

Android already does this, somewhat.<p>Whenever you receive a call you know beforehand if it&#x27;s spam or not. Maybe a handful of times in the last year I&#x27;ve received a spam call that wasn&#x27;t marked as spam. You can block callers and report as spam much like in Gmail.<p>When the call is not spam Android looks up on Google where the number is from and it shows the name of the business in the call screen.<p>This is working great for me. A year ago I received 2-3 spam calls per day which of course I&#x27;ve been blocking. Now I receive 1-2 spam calls per week at the most. Some weeks I don&#x27;t receive any.

Hate this is a problem that needs to be solved.<p>Love that Twilio is trying to solve it with a cool, seemingly useful approach.<p>Hate that Twilio will probably use something proprietary for this that locks people into their ecosystem even more.

Been running iOS 13 with Silence all unknown calls..send them to voicemail option.<p>Spam calls are no longer a bother Nor are really seen and important messages from those not in my contacts leave voicemails.

I can see few cases when I have not picked up calls but with this kind of verification I would pick up if they ID correctly. Calls coming from 1: hospital 2: library 3: my cable or phone company 4: my car or insurance company etc.<p>I don’t have their corp numbers saved and if we can see who is calling then it could be helpful.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a call filtering app that does not leak your contact list to the app developer or a third party?<p>Open source is preferred, but any app with a solid privacy policy would do. It would be nice to see suggestions for both Android and iOS.

If this works as advertised, this is great. Because of all the spam calls people just don’t bother answering the phone at all.<p>We just started testing texting people before we call them and getting consent on an opt in form to receive a text message.<p>Im still not sure on the “how”

I have several pbx systems running, and granted this is a newer concept. Maybe this will help residential calls, business calls on the other hand will most likely allow the consumer to still take the path of least resistance.

How does this compare to the MNOs joining together to create Project Verify.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobileauthtaskforce.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobileauthtaskforce.com&#x2F;</a>

Is anything preventing debt collectors from being Verified by Twilio?

<i>&gt;Imagine a world where you receive a phone call and know exactly who it’s coming from and what they’re calling about before you press the answer button. Crazy, right?</i><p>Now realize that it&#x27;s not you who knows it, but rather a company that is tracking all your phonecalls and decides <i>for you</i> whether you should answer or not.<p><i>&gt;Through the programmability of the Twilio platform, businesses will also be able to assign a purpose for each call to give further context.</i><p>So a malicious actor can assign a legitimate purpose to his phone call ? No thanks

Unrelated, but since this is a twilio thread ...<p>Could you please, for the love of God, give us an email verb in twiml ? Please ?

Isn’t robo calling about to be illegal?

Are there any good apps on iOS that help block unwanted calls, and identify callers?

My final and unfortunate solution for this was to stop accepting phone calls altogether. Friends&#x2F;relatives know to use Skype and IM, all important stuff goes to voicemail, everything else is on permanent mute and ignore. I wonder if it is the case for more and more people.

Why won&#x27;t spammers just spoof the verified by twilio data?

Nothing to do with Twilio: If the recipient is a mobile number, can&#x27;t just the caller text the recipient when they don&#x27;t pick up? E.g. IM YOUR DOCTOR, CALL THIS NUMBER

Sounds like CNIP from ISDN.

FFS USA, not every problem is a problem to solve by &quot;the free market&quot;. You can see the America-Is-Great Mindset in a lot of these comments: <i>Even</i> the US has a problem with robocalls, so that <i>must</i> mean it&#x27;s an unsolved problem obviously. So we have to solve it with our superior technology!!<p>Just no. Almost nobody else in the western world has this problem. How? Regulation. In Germany, if you get reported for unsolicited calling, the Bundesnetzagentur will come to you and give you a very hefty fine, per violation. Problem solved. I remember exactly four unsolicited calls in my life, two of them on a number which was published in a phone book for 15 years.<p>Spam calling is not something were there is net value created for society so we need an elaborated discussion of what is ok and what is not (like e.g. paid universities). It just sucks. Make it illegal, and then actually enforce that. The idea of creating a million dollar industry to create a telemarket arms race is...not good.

This may be the most valuable innovation out of Silicon Valley in 10 years. Talk about solving a pain point!