I'm in the Twilio WhatsApp sandbox following their tutorial. The tutorial says: "Messaging with WhatsApp has a few differences from SMS: to send outbound messages, such as notifications, you must use a pre-approved template from WhatsApp."
The tutorial lets me choose a template to send a test message, but it also lets me overwrite the text that gets sent with something unrelated - in this case the string "Random untemplated text" (as depicted in screenshot below). I clicked Make Request and I got "Random untemplated text" in a WhatsApp message on my phone.
Doesn't this contradict the statement that WA requires you to use a pre-approved template?
When you send a message to some company Whatsapp phone from your phone, it's opened a 24-hour conversation session, in this session you're allowed to send any message to the customer. In the case of the Twilio Sandbox number, to start you need first to send a code to Whatsapp, "join ...", this message opens the 24-hour session, so any message that you send via API will arrive for you. :D.
The 24-hour session is closed after 24 hours of the last customer message, when the session is closed, you can send just pre Whatsapp approved messages, and if the customer answer this message, the cycle repeat.
You can see more information about it in this documentation.
I hope that it can help you.
Related
have an interesting problem I need to solve, I was hoping if anyone could give me some sort of an idea.
For example, if I get a text from someone saying (string) “URGENT” on my iPhone, I want to call them immediately.
So say I get a message, it could be any message but if their message says “urgent”, I need to call them ASAP, even when my phone is turned off.
Is there a way to do this, using API or anything?? I have no idea!!
Example say I get a messages saying:
Number 042XXXXX sends me a text:
"Hi Name, I have some urgent work for you"
Number 1300 XXX XXX sends me a text:
"Urgent help needed"
Both of these messages would be read by iPhone and their respective numbers would be dialled urgently.
Is there such a way to do this/automate this??
Any advice would be appreciated!!
I have no idea what to do, I am blank!!
I think the problem you have needs an indirect solution because, as Paulw11 points out, Apple don't allow you to inspect the message directly.
It would be possible to make use of Twilio's Programmable SMS API to setup a special phone number that customers could send text messages to. Then you use the APIs of Twilio to read the messages and then send an Apple Push Notification message for those the had "urgent" in the message.
You could then write an iOS app which receives push notification messages and takes the actions you desire. For example, it could present a screen which could automatically dial the number in question.
Setting up to respond to SMS replies. I've gone to my Active Numbers page, selected the number (I only have one), gone to the Messaging Service section (again only one service) and in "A message comes in", I've specified the URL of one of our HTTP Handlers. It's a .Net Core handler that we use all the time. It will try to process anything sent to its URL:
https://ourserver/lmw/core/filemanager?SC=SMS
I send an SMS message to my personal number, reply "Help", and send that. Nothing hits that URL. I have it in the debugger and it catches anything I send it. It just doesn't get hit by the reply to the SMS message.
What am I doing wrong?.. or did I misunderstand how this works?
EDIT:
I found an "Integration" section in the Messaging Service. It was set to "Defer to sender’s webhook"... which sounds right but I changed it to "Send a webhook -- Invoke an HTTP webhook for all incoming messages"... which sounds like the same thing. Anyway, it didn't change a thing. I'm still not receiving a post on the http handler.
Please note that "Help" is a special keyword when using messaging services.
According to the Twilio Help Center:
Twilio does not forward HELP/INFO messages to your incoming message webhook by default. However, if you use Advanced Opt-Out for Messaging Services, Twilio does forward HELP/INFO requests to your inbound webhook.
This is not a good answer but I wanted to close this out. I started over and released my phone number and bought a new one. I went to Active Numbers and selected the new phone. In "A message comes in", I put my webhook url in both primary and primary fails and saved that.
I then went to Messaging, Services, and selected my service. In Integration, I clicked "Defer to sender's webhook" and then put the handler url in "Callback URL" and saved that.
I went to compliance and the first two were done but 3. Campaign Use Case was incomplete. I completed that.
In Opt-out management, I edited that and put in some of my own text.
After doing all this, I replied to the message and got a response in the handler. Not sure which one of these was the problem but doing it all over seemed to work. Sorry I can't provide a better insight.
Is it possible to maintain both group text messages and single text messages with users and keep them separate? I understand there is no concept of a group message per se, but wanted to see if any recent advances in tech has made this possible with Twilio or other providers.
In short, I am creating a POC where a user inside an iOS App can send invoke an API call to my backend application. This application receives a phone number from someone's contact list, and then connects to Twilio to send the SMS message to that target user.
When the user replies, I was researching Twilio Web hooks to receive the message, and then save it in the database. The originating user, then, would be able to see the message on a screen.
I would guess that when a user responds to the twilio message, the only metadata that comes in is their message and phone number, so the "foreign key" is the phone number.. Thus when I save it in my database, I have their phone number and message.
This works up until someone decides to target two or more people in an SMS message using my API, and then target one of those people individually. For example they select me as a sole recipient, and then select me and someone else as a group text message.
In this case, how could my system/Twilio differentiate between if I was responding to the group message, or to the single message?
Any ideas or work arounds? Maybe another technology? Thanks!
I wanted to provide an answer to this in case anyone else was looking into this.
Essentially you pay 3 cents (0.03) per month per active user in each group. Basically you buy phone numbers for each group chat you need.
https://www.twilio.com/conversations/pricing
So if you're doing a million group chats obviously it can get costly, but for simple POCs this isn't the end of the world.
Enjoy!
So, I have WHMCS setup to use Twilio with a new module, however, I have managed to get as far as setting it up and having SMS messages go out to customers in Australia as I have an AUS number connected to my Twilio account.
The issue is that when say for an example a US customer signs up the SMS fails and says "cannot send sms", the logs aren't helpful for this Twilio newb.
Here is the example:
The process of sending SMS to the user phone number (+1310xxxxxxx) from the summary page has failed - Twilio (company name)
If I was to send a message to say Spain it seems to work, which is odd enough.
I also tried on a +34 and it sent. Also seems to work on the UK +44.
I have GEO options setup to work as they should within Twilio, though, the error message does not appear on my Twilio logs, simply internal.
Here is the module log.
I have only edited the text out to give you what is showing.
Request:
Array
(
[To] => +1310xxxxxxx
[Body] => test
[From] => Company name
)
Response
The 'To' phone number: +1310xxxxxxx, is not currently reachable using the 'From' phone number: Company name via SMS.
So presently SMS messages to the USA do not work, I cannot speak for every other country out there though, what can I do here or how would I set my Twilio account correctly to ensure my SMS messages are being delivered?
Many thanks.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
From what you're saying I think you're sending messages using an alphanumeric sender ID rather than a phone number?
If that's the case then you are getting rejected from the US because the US telephone system doesn't accept alphanumeric sender IDs (neither do some other countries, just not the ones you've tested). You can see the countries that do and don't support alphanumeric sender IDs in this table in our documentation.
To fix this you'll need a number to send the messages from in the US, I'd recommend getting a new US number for this.
Then you can either catch the error and retry using the number in place of the sender ID.
Or, for a more resilient method, take a look into Twilio Messaging Services that can do automatic failover to a number when sending with alphanumeric senders.
Let me know if this helps at all.
I want to build an app in swift to send sms or email on scheduled date and time and the data need to be stored in database. I know we need to use MFMessageComposeViewController or MFMailComposeViewController for sending sms/email but how to send only on scheduled date?
For example: I want to schedule a sms for birthday wish of my friend on his birth date and let the app send the message on that specific date or time.
Can somebody share any tutorials related to this type of questions?
It sounds like you're trying to send emails and texts without prompting the user to fill in their content. The classes you mentioned are used to present views that allow the user to fill in the message content, like shown below.
If you would like to send email from the app without using the users email address and allowing them to fill in the content, you'll need to use an email service that provides an API, like Mailgun.
Unfortunately, you won't be able to send emails when the app is in the background. To do this, you should use a backend server to schedule emails.