cloudxtreme / betty

Google Voice with Receptionist abilities, built on top of Twilio

Open source Google Voice with Receptionist abilities

Betty (or Ben for the ones who prefer a male receptionist) is your own customizable receptionist, to forward call and messages to your team anywhere in the world. It's particularly useful if your organization is operating in the US, but based in another countries.

Betty is easy to setup and build on top of Twilio and Node.js, it doesn't necessitate a database (stateless). It can be deployed to Heroku or any unix server.

What Betty can do?

One phone number for all your organization

Betty is running on top of one or more phone numbers that represent your organization.

Forward call to available team members

When receiving a call, Betty will forward it to an available team member.

Forward text messages to team members

Like calls, when receiving an SMS, Betty will forward it to all of your team members, the first one to answer will start a session with this caller, he can after that stop the conversation by sending betty: stop.

Makes it easy for your employee to pass phone calls from the organization

When a team member is calling Betty, he/she can ask to be put in touch with a specific number, Betty will dial the number and forward the call to you.

This also works for text messages, simply text Betty with betty: Call [phone] or betty: Text [phone].

Phone directory for your team members

A team member can also contact Betty to get access to the organization directory (using phone call or sms). For example, just text Betty with: betty: What is Aaron's phone number?.

Web Dashboard

Betty is providing a nice dashboard to manage calls, messages and voicemail. You can pass calls and send SMS right from your browser.

The Receptionists Team

Betty can be configured to use another profile (voice, language, sentences, etc.). Change your receptionist by changing the PROFILE environment variable (see below).

ID	Name	Voice	Language
betty	Betty	woman (alice)	en-us
ben	Ben	man	en-us
catherine	Catherine	woman (alice)	fr

Deployment

Deploy Betty on your own machine using:

# Install Betty using NPM
$ npm install betty-cli -g

# Configure it
$ export TEAM=Samy:[phone],Aaron:[phone]
...

# And finally start it
$ betty

Create a TwiML application with the following urls and associated it to a phone number:

* Voice
   * Request URL: {host}/twiml/call
   * Fallback URL: {host}/twiml/call/fallback
* SMS
   * Request URL: {host}/twiml/sms
   * Fallback URL: {host}/twiml/sms/fallback

Configuration

Configuration is set using environment variables:

Name	Description
PORT	Port for running the application (Default is 3000)
HOST	Hostname where the application is accessible
SECRET	Password for authentication in the dashboard and api
PROFILE	Receptionist profile to use
PHONES	List of phone numbers used by Betty separated by commas
ORG_NAME	Name of the organization
TEAM	Comma separated list of team members in the format name:phone, example TEAM=Samy:[phone],Aaron:[phone]
TWILIO_SID	API Application SID for Twilio
TWILIO_TOKEN	API Application Token for Twilio
TWILIO_APPID	SID of your TwiML application

REST API

Betty provides a REST API with the same features that the dashboard:

Details about Betty and your account (balance, usages)
GET /api/account

List team members:
GET /api/team

List calls:
GET /api/calls

Details about a specific call:
GET /api/calls/<id>

List SMS
GET /api/sms

List Recordings
GET /api/recordings