Periodically, I like to send friendly text messages to large groups of people in my contacts. Sending the same message to lots of people is tedious, but I've never been fully satisfied with solutions offered by existing apps. So, I started developing my own.
I started with a Shortcut that works pretty well and has a few defining characteristics:
Messages can have "tags", such as for swapping in a contact's name, for a more personal touch.
Contacts receive their own personal text message. They are not part of a group message. No publicized phone numbers or delete-me-from-the-group bombs.
I can leave the process alone while it works; I don't have to confirm each message to send.
The whole process is serialized and persisted. If the process halts due to a faulty contact (like a disconnected phone number), I can resume the process right where I left off. No contact gets sent a duplicate message.
Shortcuts are a poor man's programming, though, and I was aching for a proper development experience. So I started learning Swift and writing an app to give me a more robust, UI friendly version of the Shortcut.
Alas, I fear I may have been eager. I haven't been able to find any documentation or examples of sending an iMessage or SMS text message to a contact without the need of some UI. MSMessageAppViewController is not what I want, because that sort of defeats the purpose of my automation goal here.
It seems very odd to me that Shortcuts would allow me to send text messages to a bunch of contacts without needing to confirm each message, and yet I can't do the same in a Swift program. Maybe I'm missing something?
This isn’t really an answer to your issue (I believe you can only use MSMessageViewController to send messages), but I did discover you can disable iMessage and Group Messaging and make it so when you send a message to a large group of people it sends them as individual, direct SMS messages.
I used this to send a text out to a group of 90 people without inciting a mass group thread. It was annoying to setup (and if you don’t set it up properly you’ll end up making a giant group thread which is scary) and you have to remember to undo the changes after, but it worked like a charm!
See this q/a: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5211685?answerId=22908620022#22908620022
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I have a contact flow that is using a pre-recorded voice prompt with a lex bot for voice rec. This is the main menu verbiage:
“Thank you for calling. If you would like to use your keypad to select the menu options, say “keypad”, otherwise please listen to the following menu options. For billing questions, say “billing”. To report a missed pickup, say “missed pickup”. If you are a current customer with recycling or other account questions, say “other”. If you are not a current customer, and have questions, say “sales”. To hear the menu again, say “repeat menu”. For all other questions, please remain on the line.”
I have set the error handling in the Lex bot to speak "Sorry, I'm having a hard time understanding you. Let's try using the keypad instead to make sure we route your call properly."
This is working when an utterance is not matched or an invalid option is spoken or pressed. However, I cannot figure out if it's possible to allow the lex bot to timeout like in a normal DTMF contact flow and send the caller to the next step in the menu without playing the error handling in from the Lex bot.
Is this possible?
That's the thing, Lex is not meant to be used this way. It MUST have an input to process, and if it reaches Lex's timeout, then it will always return an error and deliver the error handling response.
So you will have to get fancy in the Connect Flow to catch the Lex error message, and turn it into your own handling of it. But it will be hard to know whether Lex is erroring because it didn't understand, or because the user chose not to respond.
Therefore, I would personally avoid building the bot in a way that allows the user to remain silent. The user must direct Lex every step of the way and have easy ways of backing out of an unwanted action.
Remember that Lex is much more powerful than the old automatic call systems, so trying to force Lex into that old system won't work well. Depending on how you design your bot, you can make the conversation much much more natural, accepting a very wide range of responses and directing those into proper actions.
Tips:
Things may have changed more recently, but when I was building Lex/Connect, it was not possible for the user to interrupt a playback message. So I had to also avoid what you are trying to do in the welcome message:
If you would like to use your keypad to select the menu options, say “keypad”, otherwise please listen...
Naturally, a user who does want to use the keypad will try to immediately say "keypad" and probably get frustrated by having to listen to the rest of the playback message. So I design every playback message to be short, deliver information first, and always end on the question. Often breaking the conversation up into more branching points to make the questions as specific as possible.
Don't worry about going back and forth with the user too many times. It gives the user comfort knowing they are on the right path to what they want and are able to control the conversation in smaller steps. They will get stressed, having to listen to long list of options and remembering what they are while figuring out which one best applies to them.
So make each question as clear as possible and avoid spoonfeeding options. It feels less natural to explicitly state to the user what they should say:
To report a missed pickup, say “missed pickup”.
That is unnatural.
A good middle ground would be asking one question with a list of options and pausing between each option. The user will understand that these are responses they should make, but won't feel unnaturally pressured into exact phrases. For example:
Would you like to, check your billing, report a missed pickup, ask about sales, or something else?
That is natural.
We are comfortable handling those types of questions because we often do that when speaking with humans. You may even want to use a question mark instead of commas so that the playback voice uses a questioning intonation with each option. It looks less natural in written form, but would probably sound more natural.
Last tip: Don't design your bot based on your experience talking with bots. Design your bot based on your experience talking with humans.
I'm developing an iOS app that sends notifications to individual groups of users. Number of users per group will most likely be in the order of 1-7, but can exceed that and while the app generally doesn't set a limit, I hardly see it exceeding 20.
Currently I've set it up with the topics approach and it works like it should. I understand this approach is optimized for throughput rather than latency, as opposed to device groups.
Nearing completion of my app, I'm considering to change to device groups. However, I don't see many advantages, especially considering the substantial complexity that comes along with it.
Notifications at the moment is fast enough. As long as delivery time doesn't suddenly increase by a lot, it's perfectly fine at the moment.
How secure are topics compared with device groups?
The app does allow the user to use more than one device, but I don't see that happening often - realistically quite seldom. However if that were to happen, device groups would handle it better. Still, I think it's an acceptable compromise to stick with topics.
For device groups to work, I have to create a new collection server-side to manage device registration tokens and their updates, pairing with my existing data structure and implementing several http requests. I also need to query for the notification_key every time I want to send a notification, instead of sending it to the more obvious id I now use for topics.
I've read through other questions on SO, but wanted to get some fresh thoughts on this. My opinion is to stay with topics unless convinced otherwise
I'm using both of these delivery methods and yes, topics are far easier to manage but that comes at a cost of security. If your groups are public in nature then you should be fine with topics. If they're meant to handle more sensitive/private information you should probably go with device groups / individual tokens. Reason being, topics are more public facing and anyone can listen in on them, even devices not on your app.
I use Twilio to operate an automated phone line that connects callers to resources for some very sensitive topics. If the phone numbers of callers were revealed due to a data breach or subpoena, it could have negative consequences for them. There's no need for us to log callers' numbers, and ideally I'd like to not store that information at all. However, these numbers show up in my usage logs:
I've searched for ways to prevent these numbers from being logged or to delete them after they've been logged, but I can't find anything documented. Is there a way to do this?
Partial answer: You can delete the record of a call using the API DELETE functionality:
DELETE https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/{AccountSid}/Calls/{Sid}.json
You can have a script periodically request all calls made to the number and call DELETE for each one. If your system involves recordings, transcriptions, or texts, you need to do the same for them.
This is an acceptable solution for our needs, but it would be ideal if the numbers weren't logged in the first place, so I'm still interested in hearing others' answers.
In a World of Warcraft Vanilla Lua Addon Development, how can I issue an HTTP call to receive data back? If not, how can I get data from a web source into the game while playing?
I have a feeling the answer is tragically short, but would like the question asked and answered on Stack Overflow. My research came up lacking, and I recall doing some LUA in ~2007 and was disappointed.
Well, tragically short is an understatement. You simply can't. There was never any APIs that interacted directly with connections, let alone create any, let alone to arbitrary URLs.
Most of them just broadcast game events that occur from the game's connection, and the closest thing you can get to a "data stream" is add-on chat channels. But since bots violate the ToS, you wouldn't be able to make an account that responds to your addon's inquiries.
The closest thing you can get is building an "asynchronous mesh network", but that's only good if your addon has a considerable user base, and it's not guaranteed you'll get information timely.
The general idea is that your addon will have a public key (as in encryption), and you (only you) will detain a private key. Your addon emits a message to any connected peers, which store it on cross-realm SavedVariables, and you hope that someone will have characters on more than one realm. Upon login, the client addon will broadcast its latest packet (still encrypted) to that realm's addon channel, and hopefully within a week or so you might get the updated information across all clients.
A disadvantage is that you'll only get "push" notifications, the client won't be able to send any data back to you*.
That, or you could release a patch for the addon on Curse :P
BUT WAIT!
You mention vanilla, so I can presume you're developing this for a private server. Private servers often have one or a very small amount of realms, making the above mesh network much simpler. Instead of a mesh, just have encryption and manually login&broadcast on each realm every time you want to update the information retrieved.
Plus, you might even be able to contact the server devs to allow you an API that sends messages to the appropriate ingame addon channel (you'd have to ask).
Of course, if you pretend to make your addon server-agnostic, instead of tailored to a specific server, you're back to square one.
* Unless you are really dedicated to make that happen, because it's a ton of work.
There is no web API in vanilla WoW. There is a web browser widget in the game currently though, albeit very limited in usage.
If you have access to the server software code, you may be able to hook listening on specific game channels for user messages in a defined format, and let the server respond in a way for the addon to parse it.
We are getting close to releasing our new rails app and so far interest seems very strong we are a little worried about where bottle necks will be. One seems to be system e-mails on signup and in other situations. Is this correct?
Should individual e-mails to users be sent asynchronously in the background? If so, what would be the best solution?
I have looked at a few solutions and can't seem to find anything definitive.
In the backgroud using http://github.com/tobi/delayed_job
I would say it depends on your requirements. If you need to be able to inform the user that sending mail failed, do it in the same thread.
If not, sending mail should support things like retries etc, so I would put the message into a queue/the filesystem/database table/etc and have another thread/process deal with the details of sending.
Same thread, if you ask me.... by generating a file in a drop folder, which an email server picks up. Then there is not too much overhead, so a seaprate threads makes little sense.
At least this is how I always handle this.