Nomadic Phone - The webphone for Digital Nomads

This is a quick prototype of a web application build with the Twilio API.

Why use this webapp?

You are a digital nomad, you travel around the world and you work remotely.

• Use a real phone number to manage your business
• Make a phone call in your home country directly from your web browser
• Send and receive SMS from the browser
• Email notification when you got a phone call or a SMS
• Choose what you want to do on incoming calls:
  • Send everything to the voicemail
  • Redirect the call to another phone number, by example a local prepaid phone
  • Answer directly to the call inside your browser

You are minimalist, you don't use a mobile phone but you need a phone number for banks and public services

• Yes, it's possible to live without a mobile phone!
• Prepaid plans are so expensive, especially in Canada if you compare to Twilio pricing (Telus = $0.30/min and Twilio = $0.02/min)

You live in many countries, you need to have a local phone number for each one

• By example, I have a bank account in France and another one in Canada, so I need a local phone number for each country
• I want to call my family from oversea but I don't like Skype and my mum don't know how to use Skype, my mum can use a real phone...
• Use a local Twilio phone number for each country and make calls locally with your browser

Features

• No dependency (copy/paste/edit config file)
• Handle incoming calls: send to the voicemail, redirect to another number, answer from the webapp
• Make a call from the browser (use Flash or WebRTC)
• Calls history
• Listen recordings from the browser (HTML5 audio)
• Send a SMS to any phone number
• Receive SMS (only for some countries)
• Email notification when you got a call or a new SMS
• Display GeoLocation of SMS and calls when possible
• Access protected by a password (HTTP Basic Authentication)
• Free Software (License GPLv2)

Requirements

• A webserver to host PHP scripts
• PHP >= 5.3
• PDO (Sqlite)
• HTML5 browser
• Headphone or integrated micro (work on a Macbook Air)
• Twilio Account

Todo

• Add a blacklist
• Add contacts
• Choose how to handle an incoming call when a contact call you
• At the moment, this project is a quick and dirty PHP script :)
• Make a real webapp, not just a proof of concept

Installation

1. Create a Twilio account and a Twilio Application (You can try with their trial mode)
2. Setup your Twilio Application

• Voice request URL: http://yourwebsite/?handler=receive-call
• Voice status callback URL: http://yourwebsite/?handler=callback-call
• SMS request URL: http://yourwebsite/?handler=receive-sms
• SMS status callback URL: http://yourwebsite/?handler=callback-sms

3. Copy all PHP scripts inside the directory of your choice
4. Make this directory writeable
5. Change values inside the file config.php
6. Enjoy!

Screenshots

Incoming calls

Make a call

Calls history

Send a SMS

SMS history