Listen - A smart phone number

@neekunjnshah We hope!

@laurenleto fantastic! Can you please add one feature that everyday i wish my phone had?: Status. Basically I'll set my status to "meeting", for example, so that incoming calls from my inner circle receive an auto-responder, kind of "Soufian is in a meeting"

@malihsoufian Yup! That's how auto-response works–we've been thinking about renaming it to 'Busy mode' though–status is also good!

@malihsoufian Oooo but I like that inner circle twist...GREAT idea

@laurenleto Awesome! Glad you like it. My wife sometimes worry when i'm not responding. that will help :)

@rrhoover woo! good insight. text ya later :)

@laurenleto LOVE the auto-response feature. When will group texting be supported?

@rrhoover Your crazy for posting your number... Good thing Listen has auto-response When will it have call block for spam calls??!!!

@parkerwoodward @rrhoover If you use Listen we have a default setting where contacts ring your phone 'like normal' (read: full screen) and people who are NOT in your contact book ring your phone as push notifications. So spam calls are in no way as intrusive when you're on your phone–plus you can mute them afterward and never see a call from that number again :)

@laurenleto That's cool...just hard to ignore all the robo calls, you can mute 1,000 and still get just as many calls, would be nice to mute one and then label as a robo call so other Listen users would benefit...food for thought :)

Hi @hgottfried. Thanks for checking us out. Lauren wrote a blog post that will hopefully shine some light on why we built Listen. https://medium.com/@laurenleto/l...

Nice TLDR at the end there. Listen looks nicer than GV or Burner, happy to try it out!

@bsuto thanks!

@hgottfried hey! yep, one of hardest things about explaining Listen to new users is that it *sounds* like other products. but what we're really doing is redefining what it means to be a phone number. everyone who builds a phone service builds voice with a set of expected behaviors and we believe some of those expected behaviors are wrong. that's why we let you disable voicemail or mute a contact or receive calls as push notifications. a lot of people don't like phone calls so why shove calls in their face? if we *have* to have a phone number for things like; making a doctor appointment, calling a loved one, receiving verification texts for login-why not try to make it behave better and give users more control?

@laurenleto would love those kinds of examples on that homepage. Common uses cases / problems would help make it click, much quicker. Great job!

@joelwish Thanks! Most of our design work has been done by @camh–he's a triple threat: iOS, design, +drinking :)

@ericfriedman thanks, E ROCK

@elliot_grossbard And we'll get to you ASAP!

@androidlove We don't have an Android app *yet*, but Listen will work on multiple iPhones!

@androidlove hey! we receive texts/MMS and can ring multiple phones provided app is downloaded on all those phones (but not yet on android, sadly). we are a full-featured phone service, we just put texts/calls into our app instead of dumping them into your iMessage/android text app

@laurenleto Just installed it and will try it out, so grateful you guys a tacking the Google Voice void. Any MMS support to multiple numbers coming???

@matthewmagellan We completely agree. We actually are leaning towards end-to-end instead of iMessage's asymmetrical encryption but would love to hear argument otherwise. We built this version with expectation that most early users would be talking to people who WERENT using Listen. Now that we've launched, we're going to be building Listen user to Listen user features. (Including encryption!)

@laurenleto Sounds awesome! 🔒

@laurenleto to build on this, when we live in an age of a paranoid internet from spying, how can you ease the mind of people essentially sending all of their data through you? Are people's phone calls passed through? How does this work for the non-techy and can they feel safe?

@bauermetal hi! answered below and can't link but: Data is transferred to and from the client with TLS. Our database is encrypted at rest by using AES-256, block-level storage encryption. Keys are managed by Amazon, the individual volume keys are stable for the lifetime of the volume. All calls, texts, and media are deleted from Twilio via their Delete API see https://www.twilio.com/blog/2014... BUT unfortunately we can't ensure security of SMS because it travels through many other companies. We can't change that. Phone numbers as a system have historically been unsafe and carriers are a main reason for that in many ways, including this most disgusting way: http://www.thedailybeast.com/art... I left ATT and ported my # to Listen However, we plan to build end-to-end encryption for users who are talking to other Listen users. ----------

@laurenleto Thanks for the quick reply! I'm looking forward to trying the product as well as E2E Encryption in the future!

@ambonium Sorry, what caption?

@ambonium hi! good feedback. i assume you mean the tagline, "a smart phone number"? Does "a better Google Voice" make more sense to you? basically, we want to convey that we're a full-featured phone service that acts more like how a phone number *should* act nowadays. Google Voice was a great product which sadly hasn't been updated in a LONG time. so we built our own. would love your feedback!

@laurenleto I agree. Something more descriptive of the awesomeness inside Listen. Perhaps something more like: "A shareable phone number with smart controls."