I was wondering if anyone knows of good resources for learning how to send Twilio messages based on what message a client sends. For example if a client texts "current song", to send the current song title. If a client texts "current artist", to send the current artist. I wasn't able to find anything about that in the Twilio documentation. I may have overlooked it or something. Wasn't sure how to do a Google/Bing search on the topic as I wasn't getting results with my search term.
Thanks in advance!
Twilio Developer Evangelist here,
For your example, you would want to parse the message body of any incoming SMS and have some logic on your end that checks if that message is "current song" or "current artist" and handle that appropriately. How you handle generating a response is left entirely to the developer's discretion.
To get up and running quickly with receiving and responding to SMS, check out the Twilio documentation if you haven't already. The dropdown on the right hand will let you select from several languages to get started with.
A quick example using NodeJS with Express would look like this:
router.post('/text',function(req,res) {
if(req.body.Body == "current artist"){
console.log("A request for the current artist has been made.");
}
});
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!
I have a Dialogflow and Twitter integration and all seems to be working fine, except for one scenario.
I have an intent that is looking for negative statements from tweets that mention the Twitter user linked to the Dialogflow integration (lets call it #Target). The purpose of this is to then reply back with a Twitter direct message (DM) link, inviting the person to engage in conversation to further explore their problem.
The scenario steps that do not work are:
Send Tweet to #Target saying for example "Your service is really bad". At this point, the output context is "negative-sentiment" if DF recognises it.
If that is the case, DF then sends back a response with a link that will allow the user to open up a DM session to further explain their issue. In this example they may have a gas supply issue.
The user opens the link in the tweet reply to start the DM.
At this point, I am looking for an explanation of the issue, for example "My gas supply has been cut off". However, if I do that, it does not recognise the intent. I have to at this point re-enter the phrase "Your service is really bad" to get it to register the "negative-sentiment" context, then I can move on.
What does work, is if I start with a DM stating "Your service is really bad", followed by "My gas supply has been cut off". It's almost as if clicking on the reply to tweet either forgets the context or its actually a different DF session that is created once we fall into the DM.
So, has anyone seen this behaviour before? Thank you in advance for your replies.
When you attempt to switch from #mentions to DMs on Twitter keep in mind the sessions don't carry over (they are separate sessions) so what you'll need to do going forward is keep track of usernames on the backend in order to connect the two distinct sessions.
We use twilio for sending message.
We are not sure how to correlate the response with the message we send. We might send multiple messages to the same Mobile. But, not sure how to correlate response with the messages we sent as the SID's are different.
Is there anyway to relate the response with the message.
Thanks
No, SMS doesn't work like that.
I you send me 5 text messages from your cellphone and then I reply to one you have no way of telling which one I'm replying to.
It's not a Twilio limitation, the SMS standard has no provision to track replies to individual messages
As an afterthought I came up with a hacky solution to this. It's a bit involved so I guess it depends how much you want the functionality.
This works for me using Chrome beta on Android 7.0, YMMV.
Create a php script with the following code and put it on your webserver:
<?php
// increase last digit as necessary to suit string length of your variable
$smsid = substr($_SERVER["QUERY_STRING"],0,1);
// Query database for SMS id, record timestamp of request, optionally return text to be included at the beginning of the SMS reply
$msg= urlencode($databaseResult);
// Remove <?body=$msg> if you just want the link to create a blank reply. Change the phone number to your incoming Twilio number.
header( "Location: sms:+1555444333?body=$msg" )
Now sign up for a URL shortening service which passes URL parameters and create a shortened URL which points to your php script. I used tr.im.
Depending upon your volume of SMS you will have to adjust the length of your variable, but unless you spam people to death I'm going to assume a single character will be enough to identify a unique text.
Using the example tr.im/SMS as your shortened url, you append a variable to the end like so tr.im/SMS?A and put the link in your outgoing SMS. When the user clicks the link your server redirect will open the SMS app on their phone and create a text to your number. If you have included the "?body=$msg" in your php above the new message will have your text at the start.
Personally I probably wouldn't bother adding text, they might delete it before they send it anyway and it's just likely to confuse people. If you log the request variables and timestamps to your database you should be able to tie them together with the phone number as most people will send you their reply within a couple of minutes of the server request. You can also increase the length of your custom URL variable if you struggle to correlate messages. Recycle variables once you have linked a reply etc...
Finally change your Twilio configuration so your outgoing SMS present the company name instead of your Twilio number as the sender. Users cannot directly reply to messages if the sender isn't a number, so they will have to use your link.
Generate a sequential identifier for each message and append it to your link. Save the identifier to your database along with the corresponding message Sid from Twilio and the number you sent it to so you can match them up later.
Append "Click tr.im/SMS?$ to reply" to outgoing SMS, where $ is your variable.
Profit.