Say Anything - We’re All Ears

The design team is kicking off an effort to spend more time listening to you, our beloved Burner community. Whether you’ve never used Burner before, you just started or you’ve been a longtime fan, we want to talk with you. Really, we’re all ears.

Here’s how the conversations work:

1. Let us know you're interested in talking with us. You can do this by filling out the following form or send an email to Lex at lex@burnerapp.com with the subject “Let’s talk Burner.”

2. We'll email you and find a 20 minute time slot that works for your schedule

3. Then, we'll talk! We'll have a few questions for you and you can share your experience using the app.

We want to make Burner better and it all starts by hearing your thoughts - the good, the bad and the annoying. It’s fast, easy and painless (we hope). I’ll even send you my favorite lemonade recipe as a bonus! Wow, what a deal! 

Thank you in advance and don’t hesitate to reach out with any questions.

Ready for Android N with Burner 3.5 (plus GIFs!)

Burner for Android has been updated to take advantage of some exciting new features of Android N: Direct Reply for notifications and split screen Multi-Window support.

Improved Messaging 

Reply from the Home Screen

As you can see in the screenshots below, you can now reply to incoming text messages without leaving the home screen. Simply slide down the notification, tap reply, type your reply, and hit send. The notification updates inline, and you can see a few message back in the conversation in the notification tray.

GIFs and Smoother Animations

If you have a Picture or Subscription Burner, you can now express that perfect emotion or reaction with those brief animations we know as GIFs. This update also makes the messaging window animations smoother and more native-feeling.  

Multi-Window Mode

Burner now also supports Android's Multi-Window mode. You can have two apps either side-by-side in landscape mode or or one above the other in portrait mode. This allows you to have Burner running in one window while viewing a web page or composing an email in another.

Say Hello to Ghostbot, a Smart Bot That Can Handle Your Unwanted Texts

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Say hello to the latest innovation in open phone numbers.

We’re pleased to introduce Ghostbot, the witty text message autoresponder that anyone can add to Burner to handle unwanted, aggressive, or abusive texting situations.

Ghostbot is both a glimpse of the future and a small taste of what’s possible when the newly popular concept of “bots” converges with Burner phone numbers that are smart and open for anyone to build on.

Why Ghostbot?

Texting is a fun, convenient, and regular part of dating culture these days. But we’ve heard from many of our users—and we know from public conversation and the surging popularity of social media communities like @ByeFelipe—that unwanted, aggressive, and even sexually harassing texts are a real and growing problem.

So we partnered with Voxable, the bot makers, and Peter Miriani, a screenwriter, to build a smart, free utility for Burner to help keep people safe and free of unwanted advances.

No longer want to deal with someone? Aren’t sure how to exit gracefully? Don’t want to inflame the situation? Once you switch Ghostbot on, an intelligent agent will take over and handle aggressive, abusive, or otherwise don’t-want-to-deal-with-it texts for you with humor, effective disengagement tactics, and a touch of artistry.

Ghostbot is a glimpse into the future of phone numbers

In contrast to bot-of-the-day strategies that seem to be popping up everywhere, this is not just another way to order a pizza, call an uber, or "join the conversation" with your favorite millennial-targeted brand. Apps on Burner work for the user.

Ghostbot is an example of what kinds of things are in store for our users in the future. The tools we’ve built into our platform make the phone number smarter in ways that traditional carriers can’t (and won’t).

Best of all, anyone can build “bot” or agent-style applications that sit on top of Burner lines using the incoming and outgoing webhooks we built into Burner Connections.

We think Ghostbot is just a small taste of what's possible when intelligent agents are embedded into smarter communication tools. (Want to help us? We're hiring!)

Setting up Ghostbot

It’s simple.

1. Visit the Ghostbot web page and activate Ghostbot on your Burner number (or create a free new Burner number now if you don’t already have one). You’ll want to download the Burner app as well, to manage other settings on the number and to use it with the people you don’t want to ghost.

2. Select or add the contact(s) you want to ghost. 

3. Wait for a message. When Ghostbot sees incoming texts from a person who has been “ghosted,” it runs a Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine to reply. After a variable delay, it replies to the message with one of many possible scripted responses: For example, “nope,” “I just have no time right now,” “sorry, I’m just completely overwhelmed with work,” or “sorry, just me and 🍕 tonight.” This continues until the conversation peters out and the texter gets the hint.

How Ghostbot works

Ghostbot is built atop a 3rd-party platform called API.ai that has been trained to understand some intents. It also learns from experience. For instance, Ghostbot can determine when a text is a “let’s do something” invitation, a “booty call”, a pick-up line, a proclamation, or a lewd comment, among others.

Ghostbot has a personality that stands in for you. It responds at random intervals with conversational and funny language so that it doesn’t feel like talking to a robot.

Here are a few examples of conversations with Ghostbot. (Ghostbot’s replies are on the left-hand side of the threads in the screenshots below.)

Ghostbot: a collaboration between Burner, Voxable Labs, and Peter Miriani

Ghostbot was developed in a collaboration with the fine bot builders at Voxable, and screenwriter/graphic novelist Peter Miriani. We like to think of it as one part practical solution, one part technology innovation, and one part art project.

A little bit more about our partners:

Founded by partners-in-business-and-life engineer Matt Buck and product designer Lauren Golembiewski, Voxable helps companies harness the power of conversational interfaces by designing and building innovative voice and chatbot experiences for their clients. Voxable’s mission is to help humans and machines better understand one another.

Peter Miriani has written numerous screenplays and graphic novels including "NSFW" and "The Luminous Aldous Spark," both currently in production. Additionally, Peter has over ten years of experience building information categorization and organization systems for search engine marketing and advertising businesses. He holds a Master's degree at USC's School of Cinema-Television. Ghostbot is his first bot.

Try Ghostbot for free

Since Ghostbot is built on Burner, our entire user community and anyone who wishes to sign up for a free-sample Burner number, can now access and use Ghostbot for free.

Get started at ghostbot.burnerapp.com.

We’re looking forward to hearing feedback from our community about Ghostbot—and other bots built using Burner’s open webhooks.

Stay safe.

Rolling Out a Stack of New Features and Smart Phone Capabilities with Burner 3.3

We’re on a mission at Burner – to build a better, smarter phone number.  

Today we’re rolling out a stack of features and updates, including a new Google Sheets Connection for text and contact exporting, a new-and-improved Slack Connection, exciting new VoIP and tablet capabilities, and a number of other enhancements including bulk message actions and an easier way to connect Burner to IFTTT and Zapier.

New Connection: Google

We’ve been thrilled by the response to our recently launched Connections platform (original blog post).  The best part of it is seeing how people use the various connections, in particular our Developer Connection – which lets users connect Burner to any webhook-enabled web service.  A number of people wanted to pump incoming Burner texts into Google Sheets, which they enabled via Zapier (recipe), so we decided to make that integration native.  

Now you can directly authorize a connection to Google from within Burner, and all incoming texts are automatically added to a new Sheet as they come in, with all new contacts being added to a separate tab.

We’ve overhauled our Slack Connection as well, affording greater control over how teams can use Burner from within Slack.  Now you can connect a Burner to a Slack channel (where any team member in the channel can see or reply) OR connect to Slackbot, which lets you use Slack as your personal texting client with Burner numbers.  We’ve also refreshed our commands around a “/burner” syntax.

Our users have been coming up with lots of interesting uses for the Slack connection, from customer service to public Q&A’s – and we think all companies interested in talking to customers by text should give this a try.   Hit us up with questions or comments at 310.919.5060 if you want to experience it yourself.  We’ll hit you back via our Slack 2.0 connection.

Finally, we’ve made it easier to connect Burner to IFTTT and Zapier – two services that let you create hundreds of custom recipes across dozens of services.  Want to flash the lights when you get a voicemail, or text your thermostat a new temperature setting? Just navigate in the app to the Developer Connection and you’ll find new links and walk-throughs.

In-App Calling, Powered by VOIP

Perhaps the biggest feature we’re rolling out starting today is a new capability allowing users to control whether calls come in and out via their underlying carrier phone (which is how Burner has historically worked) or calls are made and received within the app itself (via VoIP).  This lets users choose the call flow they prefer and makes Burner much more useful in wifi-only situations, on tablets, across multiple devices, and even internationally.

It's something many users have asked for, and we hope will love.

Burner In-app calling (VoIP) options are available today on Android and will be rolling out on iOS over the next few weeks.

 

OTHER NEW THINGS

Number Picker:  Now you can choose from a list of possible numbers and pick one that is easy to memorize. The devil may be in the details, but so is satisfaction.  You choose a local number that suits you, and isn’t that the way things should be?

Bulk delete and mark-as-read:  Many of us use Burner to avoid large numbers of unwanted calls and texts, all of which occupied inbox real estate and generated unnecessary “red ball” notifications on the app icon.  Now you can clear these with bulk actions that let you mark-as-read or delete large batches of messages.  (From within a line or the “recent messages” context, just pull down to see these options.)

Offline support:  Burner now offers better support for reading your messages offline too.

Of course these features join many others, including text auto-replies, bot replies, custom photo backgrounds and line colors, message reminders, and so much more.

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We are building phone numbers from the future.  The future isn’t taking what you get and making do - the future is about choice, flexibility and utility.  We are relentless about bringing the future of phone numbers to our customers, and Burner connections,VOIP and the many improvement we’ve made to the latest version of Burner are collectively a big step forward. Check it out here.

Download Burner today!

Slack Integration for Mobile and a Dialer That Will Make You Say “WOW.”

The Slack Connection is one of our most popular, so we’ve included two small but important updates in this release (3.2.7).  As before, you can connect any Burner line to Slack, and inbound texts, pictures, and voicemails to that Burner will appear in the selected channel for everyone on the team to see and reply to. As a new option outbound texts sent from the mobile app, can now also be sent to Slack.  

Visiting the settings screen of your Burner number (click the gear icon). After you have connected Slack to your phone number the  above options will appear.

We’ve also improved our handling of links emojis, and other formatted elements on outbound texts sent from Slack to another phone number. Yes, that is correct:  you can text people directly from slack, and you, or you and your team can see the results (choose wisely).

We’re also excited to announce the first in a series of updates centered around enhancing the way inbound and outbound calls work in Burner. The most noticeable change in 3.2.7 is a completely redesigned dialer, which we love the look of, and should be easier for those of you with small hands or big phones (or both!) to use, as we’ve positioned the keypad towards the bottom of the screen.  One beta tester’s response to the dialer was “wow,” and the whole Burner team loves a wow factor, so we are pretty happy. Try it out and have a guaranteed “wow” moment.

Underlying the new design of the Dialer is another big change that we’re keeping under wraps for now, but will start rolling out over the next few weeks. Stay tuned for more!

Revolution and Evolution in Mobile Messaging

At Burner we are always releasing features and bug fixes, but we don’t always talk about it. We tend to alternate between revolution and evolution. Today we are launching a new interface for texting, and one of its key features is the ability to view multiple lines when composing texts.  It is always feels good to make the product a little better, and to know that our customer experience is always improving.  

In all we will be releasing five new features (some are obvious and others harder to see) and nine bug fixes.  Improving Burner is a never-ending experience, and that is the way we like it.  Expect some significant new features in the coming months, but also relax and enjoy the little improvements that are being released regularly.

Click Here to Download Burner Today!

Fun with Webhooks: Text Us for A Chance to Win a Blink(1) Indicator

We decided to have a little fun with our Burner Developer Connection webhooks and the internet of things! We purchased some of ThingM's new blink(1) LED indicators for our team to play around with and test with phone numbers. These open-source lights were designed to give you glance-able notice of anything on your computer, the internet, and now: A PHONE NUMBER! It packs three dimensions of information (color, brightness, and pattern) into a single tiny package that fits into any USB port on nearly every device. So... Text us and tell us why you want one!

(310) 879-1899
All texts automated to a Google Sheet.
Winner selected noon PST Wednesday, December 23rd!

We won’t delve too deep into the specifics of our telephonic sorcery but it involves some basic online tools to put the internet (and phone numbers) to work for you!

Using IFTTT we created a Maker recipe for our blink(1). In doing so we created a webhook where our light flashed a certain color pattern based on a “triggered event.”

Next, we used Zapier’s webhooks to automate entries on a Google Sheet. Zapier matches the data sent from my Burner phone numer to the corresponding fields in our Google sheet:

So we have now created two separate webhooks (one on IFTTT and one on Zapier) that we want to work simultaneously through a single triggered event (an inbound text to our Burner). Using Reflector.io, we are able to power multiple pass-thrus with a single webhook: 

Final step is to add the Reflector webhook URL to our Burner phone number's Developer Connection

And VOILA! So send us a text at (310) 879-1899 to add your entry to our random drawing. Good luck!

Introducing Burner 3.0 for Android

We’re excited to announce that we’re launching a brand new look and feel for Burner on Android! This is our biggest design update for Android and builds upon a ton of feedback that we’ve heard from customers. The goal is always to make Burner the easiest way to stay in touch with people without compromising your personal information or phone number, and we think Burner 3.0 does just that. Here are some of the highlights:

Unified Inbox

Managing more than one number in Burner just got much easier! With the unified inbox you can view and respond to all of your recent conversations from different Burner numbers in one place. To help you stay organized, we now give each of your Burners a unique color, so when you’re viewing conversations quickly in the inbox, you know exactly which Burner someone is contacting you through. If you ever need to go through your older messages, or you only want to view the messages on one of your Burners you can easily filter by that Burner and view your entire history.

Material Design

Again, this is our biggest design update for Burner. You’ll see the use of colors, animations and transitions throughout the app, fully embracing material design principles. Navigation and design patterns should feel familiar and blend right into your workflow with all the apps you love!

Android Wear

We know that our customers are busy, managing work and personal lives and anything we can do to make Burner more accessible when you’re on the go is huge win! Burner now supports use with your smartwatch so you can quickly view your notifications and messages and respond in an instant with voice commands.

Stay tuned

This is just the beginning of a ton of new features that will be coming to Android so stay tuned and connect with us on Facebook and Twitter to get all the latest news!

Burner Profiles: The Tie Haberdashery

This week we caught up with Samantha Gold of The Tie Haberdashery, a local business in Los Angeles that specializes in vintage ties from the 1920s to the 1990s.

Samantha started using Burner as a business line to help keep her personal information private and to be able to control the amount of access her clients and customers have to her. She has not just one, but two business lines for The Tie Haberdashery: one is a customer service line that she posts on the website and online store; the other she uses as her personal business line that she can put on business cards and share with her contacts. She has six burners total. Like most entrepreneurs, she’s always hustling so she also works as an inside sales rep and has burners for that, along with a  Craigslist Burner and one for dating.

Burner Hack

One of the issues Samantha ran into after she started using Burner, was that customers began texting her. Some business owners like texting with customers, others like Samantha don’t. If you’re like Samantha, there are a couple of easy ways that Burner can help!

“On my business lines I wish I wasn’t able to get text messages...I don’t like getting text messages about business, I like getting phone calls and emails.”

First, you can always turn off text notifications in the settings menu. Notification settings are unique to each Burner, so you can have text notifications turned off on your business Burner, but leave them on for your Craigslist Burner.

Second, with the newest iOS version you also have the option to set up an auto-reply message on each of your Burners. The auto-reply feature is super handy when you’re on vacation or during non-business hours when you’re not going to respond immediately, or in Samantha’s case, setting a message that lets her customers know that she doesn’t respond to texts and that they should give her a call instead.

Check out the video for the full interview to hear more about The Tie Haberdashery and how Burner can help you run your small business.