I'm new to Twilio and I've tried searching but have come up blank - is there a way for me to pull a report of how many people are subscribed to a SMS Broadcast service? I have one set up, and I can see in the Monitor tab how many messages are being received, but I don't know how to get an actual count of current subscribers.
Sorry if this is obvious, I played around in the Monitor tab and just couldn't come up with a way to get a solid number.
Related
I have an application which uses Twilio to send SMSs.
There is a situation where the application sends multiple messages to a person, for example a message with info about product P1, then another message with information about product P2, and so on. So my question is, when the person replys the SMS, how could I know to exactly what SMS he is replying?
Or is it possible that each SMS that my application sends to the same person creates different conversations in Twilio, so I can track each response per each different SMS?, if so, how I can do it?
If you trigger the SMS messages by API it's hard to know what messages the customers answer.
We got to solve this problem using Twilio Sync (https://www.twilio.com/docs/sync/api/document-resource) which is basically cloud storage, so when we need to trigger an SMS or Whatsapp message, we save some information on Twilio Sync, like Twilio number, client number and the messages that were sent.
When the customer answers the message, we send him to a Twilio Studio that runs a Function that read the Sync document and check if this customer comes from a message response, if yes, we get the triggered message and added on the conversations, so we know the message that customer answered.
The Sync isn't a database and has a limit, so depending on your message volume, it can not work well.
I am building an app using Twilio to send out text messages and phone calls. It works great but I know there are limits to the amount of messages to send out per number in any given day. The app is going to be used to send out messages in the thousands at times, for instance to alert contacts about weather cancellations.
Since I am still developing, I do not want to send out real messages to thousands of real numbers a bunch of times while I test and configure my code.
Is there any phone apis, lists, etc. of dummy numbers that can be used as my example contacts that will at least return some form of TRUE that the number exists and received my call/message? Or return something else if I hit a use limit because of the number of messages I am sending.
I think I could get everything setup with a list of 1000 numbers since I can plan out every 250-500 calls, do this or that.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
There are no lists like that that I know of.
You do have a set of test credentials that you can use to send messages to a few "magic" numbers that will behave as if the message was successful (or failed for some reason). However there's only one success message here.
The thing about the limits of 200-250 messages per number per day is that they aren't hard limits. They are just around the level that carriers will start to consider blocking your messages. At that point you will likely still get a positive response from the Twilio API as a message is queued to be sent, but it may or may not fail at delivery time.
I recommend you look into Twilio's messaging services, they allow you to create a number pool that messages are sent from. If you are sending a number of the same messages at the same time, you can also check out Twilio Notify for sending notifications. I recently wrote up a blog post on how to set up a messaging service, number pool and Notify for bulk SMS.
Let me know if that helps at all.
I'm using Twilio chat SDK for iOS, and I've run into a problem. I can get the list of channels, get an individual channel, and get the message count for that channel successfully. The next thing I want to do is grab the last message from that channel using getLastWithCount. However, that method's completion is never called.
I need to do this without actually joining the channel, because I'm just trying to get the last message to display in a summary screen with many others. I don't want to join, because the other party may be online on the other end, and it would falsely display the user as online (even if briefly)- when it is simply an automated function at work. (They haven't entered the "chat room" yet.)
I've set client synchronization strategy to .all, and even tried synchronizing the specific channel before attempting getLastWithCount.
How would you get the last message in a Twilio chat channel without joining the channel?
Twilio developer evangelist here.
You can do this, but your users need to have a new permission to do so. The documentation on Users' Roles and Permissions is worth reading to learn more.
Default user permissions are:
createChannel
editOwnUserInfo
joinChannel
But you need one more that allows viewing channels and their messages without joining the channel. One that does this is editChannelName (not obvious, sorry about that).
To do this, you'll want to create a new role and give it those 4 permissions in total. You can then either assign that role to your users or set it as the default role for your Chat service. Once your users have this role and permissions they will be able to view the messages.
Let me know if this helps.
I have an application that allows a user to send a message to multiple contacts. I've reviewed the API for Twilio and it appears the only way to call multiple numbers is to iterate over a list of numbers. Some of the users will be sending a message to over a 1000 numbers and making 1000 REST requests seems very inefficient. Is there a way to create contacts in Twilio and add them to a group and then just send a request to call the group and play the message? I'm basically looking for something that acts more like a batch request instead of 1000 individual requests?
I've seen another question that referenced sending bulk, but it the answers didn't really say yes or no and the examples were incomplete and the question is closed.
Thanks
Twilio developer evangelist here.
One possible way you could do that, is by creating a conference room, and dropping all your users there.
You can then play the message after a few seconds once you know all your users have been dropped there.
With conference rooms, you have the ability to mute, so you could potentially start the room muted, and then play the message to everyone.
Right now, one limitation I can think of, if the fact that as of the time of writing, the conference rooms have a limitation of 40 participants, but there's nothing stopping you from spinning up multiple rooms that would help you reach those 1000 users you want to reach.
Here's some reading that might interest you.
TwiML Voice:
Moderated Conferencing
Hope this helps you
I'm making an app that sends text messages to a group of people and then people can respond to the text. I want to be able to record the response, know who sent it, and associate it with the user who sent the original message. I've gotten the sending working, and I've begun putting together receiving sms messages but i'm confused. If twilio sends a post request to my server with the from number and message, how will I know which of my users sent the original message?
what if two different users send a message to the same person around the same time? what's the best way to handle this? do I need a separate 'to' number for each of my users? seems like that would get quite expensive. also, if each user has multiple campaigns (messages), how would I associate a response to a specific campaign?
i'm building a rails app.thanks
You'll want to use a different Twilio number for each contact a user sends to. This will establish a unique mapping between the 2 mobile devices and a Twilio number. This allows you to forward incoming messages sent to the Twilio number back to the appropriately mapped mobile phone. You'll do the lookup on your mapping based on who the incoming message is From.
You won't need a Twilio number for every one of your users, but you will need a pool of numbers which is the maximum number of contacts a single person can make.
There is an article on Twilio's site which gives additional information:
https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/sms/how-can-i-have-users-send-text-messages-to-each-other-over-twilio