MMS in twilio with Background image - twilio

I need help with twilio. On a form submission we send a sms on the user's phone.
But now I want to send an SMS with background image or an MMS. I need to send a background image and over that few texts and links.
I tried the html code but it didn't rendered and displayed the html code instead of MMS.
Does any one know about it? How can I send background image and some links over it from twilio?
Any response would be greatly appreciated :)

Twilio developer evangelist here.
SMS/MMS applications do not support setting images as backgrounds or using HTML. The limits are very much that you can send some text and you can send images (or other files) and the SMS/MMS application on the receiving device will display the message as text and then the images.
If you really wanted text to appear over the image, you could programatically generate the images with the text on top and just send the image, however you still wouldn't get hyperlinks in that. It would also tie the text up in the image which would be unreadable by assistive technology, so useless to the visually impaired.
Sorry I can't help more, but the limitations are within the existing SMS/MMS applications.

Related

Twilio MMS: GIFs sent via Twilio do not play inline

I am using the Twilio PHP SDK within a Laravel app to send MMS messages.
When I send JPG or PNG files, the images display inline. When I send GIF files, the GIFs are sent as objects that the user must click on to view. They behave more like an attachment than an inline image.
The gif displays as a clickable object rather than as an inline gif
The code for constructing the object to be sent is dead simple with the helper SDK, perhaps overly so.
$response = new MessagingResponse();
$answer = $response->message("");
$answer->body("Foo");
$answer->media("/bar.gif");
print $response;
This sends the file. It is captured by Twilio and turned into a Twilio Media Resource before being sent to the user. My understanding is that GIFs are a fully supported content type in Twilio so my expectation is that they would be displayed the same way that a JPG is.
Is there some other factor I'm missing here? Or am I missing an element in the construction of the object?

Deep link that opens up Slack and auto-fills text in the message box

I wish to implement this feature that allows users to use a deep link into a Slack's channel on their phones or computers, and pre-fill some texts in the message box.
I have read through the documents and didn't find relevant solutions.
I was hoping to find a link that looks like:
https://slack.com/app_redirect?app=A1BES823B?text=prefilled_message
Deep Links in Slack do not support including a text message. You can only open a channel.
But you can use incoming webhooks to send messages to a channel on Slack.
Or if you want to provide that exact functionality you can always build your own app to do it.

writing node.js layer to send MMS message to Api.ai/DialogFlow

Right now twilio does not send MMS message to API.ai, it only sends an event if text is sent to the bot, I am trying to build a webhook that will pass that along with the text. I am trying to build off of this repo https://github.com/dialogflow/dialogflow-nodejs-client/tree/master/samples/twilio if anyone knows how to go about this or if anyone else has a repo where they have successfully done that, it would be great!
Thanks
Twilio developer evangelist here.
It's not that Twilio doesn't send MMS messages to API.ai, but the example application doesn't do so.
As you can see here the code that processes the message just looks for req.body.Body which is the text in the message. If you want to also send images to API.ai then you need to also look at req.body.NumMedia which will tell you how many images were sent and then req.body.MediaUrl0 for the first image (and req.body.MediaUrl{N} for the Nth image).
As far as I can tell from the API.ai documentation there's no way to pass an image to an API.ai agent though. They seem to deal with text only (but can return images to you).
Let me know if this helps at all.

Send mass texts with iOS

Is there anyway to send the same text to multiple contacts not as a group text. I have been told that it would need a server to accomplish this. If that is the case I would like to be able to still send texts from my current number not a new number. I have checked out Twilio but have not gotten very far.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
You cannot send mass text messages using Twilio and your existing phone number.
One option you might have is, if you have a Mac you can control the SMS app programmatically to send lots of SMS messages. Here's a blog post with some example code to do that: https://www.twilio.com/blog/2017/06/drawing-pixel-art-text-messages-signal-video-wall.html
That might not be of much help, but while you can send lots of SMS messages with Twilio, you cannot do so using your existing number.
Yes you could send mass texts out to different numbers using twilio. No you could not use your current number.
You would have to purchase a new twilio number that has SMS messaging enabled.
Look at the Twilio documentation and their get started guide, figure out the language you want to create your server in and you will be sending texts in no time. https://www.twilio.com/docs/quickstart/node/programmable-sms You would run the webserver. Twilio does not offer a swift or ios based SMS solution.
https://www.twilio.com/docs/quickstart?filter-language=swift

Apple iMessage Extension API. Detecting whether recipient is using iMessage

Is it possible to detect (programmatically), from an iMessage app extension: from the sender side: Whether the person you are talking to is using iMessage on their end, or they are an SMS/MMS user (Such as Android or Windows phone)
Basically I need to tailor my delivery experience based on whether they can render the fully rich experience, or a minimized subset of it.
For example, for iMessages, I actually want to deliver in-line video. For MMS/SMS, i maybe only want to show an Image only, or maybe even a Link only, to avoid the recipient's SMS/MMS charges.
No API is available for this. It's a really good idea though. I suggest you file an enhancement request with Apple. [Update: if anyone from Apple happens to see this, I've filed rdar://32773566 to request this.]
One possible workaround-- depending on how your app works with these videos-- is to upload the video somewhere and then send the URL as the message. On iOS, Messages.app will render a nice preview of most videos, if the sender is in the recipient's address book or the recipient has sent messages to the sender in the past.

Resources