While the entrepreneur is in an important lunch meeting, her agent-enabled phone number works for her…

The college professor uses a phone number running a smart bot to teach his students and improve his teaching…

The bride-to-be’s busy life becomes a lot more manageable with multiple phone numbers set up as personal assistants…

Change is coming. The phone number is ripe for innovation, whether big telecom is ready or not.

Here’s a glimpse into what phone numbers may look like and do for us as consumers in the near future.

The Entrepreneur

While the entrepreneur is in an important lunch with an investor, her phone number — synced to her calendar — knows she is busy. Incoming call and text notifications are silenced so as not to interrupt the meeting.

Some of the incoming calls and texts are actually filtered first, by a bot attached to the line. The bot, an intelligent agent that was configured by her and activated on the line, parses all incoming communications, responds to common questions using a set of pre-written or AI responses, and routes customer issues to a channel on Slack that’s monitored by the support team. Anything personal gets queued up for later.

Once the meeting is over, a text message comes through notifying her that a large shipment for an important customer went out during lunch. She is relieved to have that shipment off her mind.

Happy to have been able to focus on being present in her critical meeting, she heads back to the office, triggering the agent to start returning calls and messages from the car. She will invoke the same “do not disturb” mode later that evening, during her family dinner.

The College Professor

As a two-time victim of identity fraud, the college professor only gives out his personal number to close friends and family. He keeps an extra number for casual acquaintances, another as the coach of his son’s youth soccer team, and a third for calls and messages for the homeowners association he’s involved with.

But most important of all are the numbers he gives to his students.

Each class he is teaching (there are three) gets a phone number at the beginning of the term. The number is printed on the syllabus and class website. He informs his students that they can text him there, though many “frequently asked questions” about holiday class schedules, office hours, and exam times generate automatic, pre-programmed responses without needing his involvement.

The smart bot on the line can also batch and relay more complicated questions as the semester goes on. If they don’t receive a pre-programmed response, the professor informs his students, he will provide answers to those questions at the end of each class. This is both a great opportunity for the professor to get feedback, and a way to keep his students engaged.

His students like having the number because they have handy access to their teacher’s knowledge without having to hunt him down on a busy campus.

At the end of the semester, the survey that the students take is also done through the phone number — the students begin the survey by texting “end of year survey” to the number. Then they get prompted with questions, and respond via text.

The results of the survey are aggregated and parsed by an AI survey program, then forwarded to the professor and his department with suggestions for improvements, and the best student comments highlighted.

The professor loves getting the survey results — he always learns something new.

The Bride-to-Be

In addition to planning her wedding, the bride-to-be makes her living selling handmade crafts on Etsy, and as the lead guitarist in a band she started. Her responsibilities with the band also include running the band’s social media presence.

To keep all these different parts of her life organized, she maintains different phone numbers for each responsibility.

The band’s phone number has long been hooked up to a Slack channel so the whole band can respond to fan messages. They often post the number on social media, run competitions giving away signed records, and gather fan-generated content via texts, picture messages, and calls.

The Etsy number is a no-brainer — she doesn’t want to give out her personal number online, but customers are more responsive and leave better reviews if they have a direct line to her.

The number for the wedding was a fun thing, at first. She already knew how to use smart phone numbers for the band, so it was easy to set up. She also heard how difficult it was to get people to RSVP to the wedding, so she hooked the number up to a spreadsheet, and gave people the option (on the invitation) to RSVP by text message.

Most of her guests RSVP’d via text within a month of mailing the invitations.

The number turned out to be useful to give out to the venue manager, the florist, to the dressmaker, the caterers, and other vendors, so she kept it.

She wanted the wedding itself to be more interactive, so she encouraged people send photos to the number during the event. The photos were automatically collected into a slideshow, which displayed on a projector during the reception — automatic entertainment! And since the phone number cleverly saved the images to Dropbox, she was able to review and share the best ones back out to her guests later.

Although she considered sending thank-you notes by text, as a craftswoman she felt there was just no replacement for hand-written thank you notes.

The Not-So-Distant Future

These are obviously fictional scenarios, designed around customer personas to illustrate the potential for smart, open phone numbers — phone numbers that act like software — in a fun and easy-to-digest way.

But this is hardly science fiction. Some of what was included in the stories above can actually be done with Burner today. And as of our release of the Burner API this month, the technology exists to add many more robust applications and agents that run on the phone line, with the capability to read, respond to, and take programmatic actions based on incoming messages and calls.

We use phone numbers in our social and work lives, to communicate with loved ones, to buy and sell things online, to identify us and verify secure accounts. We give out our numbers to people in our inner circle, and to people we need to be in touch with for short periods of time, for reasons both important and relatively trivial. And they all text us and call us.

In many ways, SMS is becoming the new email. And just as email got smarter as innovators applied themselves to it, messaging and phone numbers generally are poised to become smarter too.

Twilio’s recent $150 million IPO for a business built on telephony APIs was very exciting for the industry. The announced launch of DIGITS, new software from T-Mobile that lets you use one phone number for all your devices or get multiple numbers on one device, is also an interesting sign that at least some of the incumbent telecom companies are invested in trying to evolve the phone number. But things in carrier world are moving in carrier time, with leaps in the consumer experience appearing few and far between. In the meantime, consumer habits and consumer messaging companies continue to be hyper-innovative.

At Burner, we recognize that consumers want more control over their phone numbers, now. They expect their apps and communication tools–all of them–to behave, and be controllable and interoperable, like software. That’s why we built Burner Connections that integrate with apps like Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, and more.

And that’s also why we recently launched the Burner API noted previously. Now any company or entrepreneur can build apps on Burner or embed smart phone applications into their services, whether those are simple auto-responders or natural language processing-based bots like Ghostbot.

With access to all our telephony features, developers don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, innovators can focus on innovating and helping us bring phone numbers into the interconnected future.