You’ve probably experienced receiving a voice operated call requesting you to “press 1 for more, or press 0 to speak to the operator” wherein after you make your choice, your call is routed to an extension/call queue. These types of capabilities are dominantly powered by Twilio — a platform allowing software developers to programmatically integrate communication capabilities like voice, video, and messaging to the applications they are building.

Looking that this market is dominantly owned by one player, we saw this as an opportunity to build a more cost-effective, open source alternative.

Challenges

Cambodia is a country consistently ranked as one of the most vulnerable to the effects of natural disasters.  In order to deliver timely and potentially life-saving information to people in disaster prone areas, People in Need Cambodia have developed an Early Warning System ‘EWS 1294’ which delivers warning messages directly to the mobile phones of people at risk.
Ensuring accessibility to all Cambodians, regardless of literacy and Internet connectivity issues — they’ve decided to implement voice-based messaging for alerts and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) for registration through Somleng. While also integrating UNICEF’s RapidPro, an open-source platform delivering rapid and vital real-time information, to manage the registration of users into the system. Read more about the project here.

Way Forward

To scale and decentralize Somleng through connecting it to more Mobile Network Operators, in more countries. For example in Nepal we’re working closely with People In Need and will roll out a Mobile Health (mHealth) platform and an Early Warning System in using Somleng. We’re also working closely with UNICEF to see how we can scale Somleng in multiple country offices. In addition, we’re in discussions with the World Food Program (WFP) who is looking at possibly replacing their existing IVR stack with Somleng while with Digital Impact Alliance who are looking at IVR solutions with their existing MNO partners.

Partnering with the private sector. We’re currently in discussions with SignalWire which is founded by the founders of FreeSWITCH (an Open Source Switch used by MNOs) about a possible partnership which would allow us to tap into this market segment. We want to continue to look at more avenues of collaboration that can take Somleng to the commercial market.

Providing a compatible alternative. Last year Twilio generated $399 Million in revenue (up 40%) from the previous year. Our goal is to create a new option in the market that is comparable to Twilio, through offering a Decentralized, Open Source, API Compatible alternative.

Photo Credits | Top: © UNICEF/UN0259881/Raab | In Article: 1) © UNICEF/UN0259879/Raab 2) © Somleng