Forward Twilio call only during business hours - twilio

Question

I've spent quite a few hours trying to find this and it still baffles me.
Am I able to only forward calls to my cell phone at certain hours, else voicemail? On the surface, this should be so simple - using a Twiml, perhaps? But I can't seem to "get it".
Thanks,
Nancy

Answer 1

Twilio Developer Evangelist here.
You can indeed do this with Twilio, but you will need to write some code and deploy it on the internet somewhere. Let's go through it.
Let's suppose that you're using this TwiML to forward your calls:
<Response>
<Dial>[phone]</Dial>
</Response>
And you want to use the Say TwiML verb during 'out of hours' time:
<Response>
<Say>The office is currently closed.</Say>
</Response>
What you need is some application that can choose between them. For example, a simple Ruby and Sinatra application would look like this:
require 'sinatra'
post '/voice' do
content_type 'text/xml'
if Time.now.hour > 8 && Time.now.hour < 18
"<Response>
<Dial>[phone]</Dial>
</Response>"
else
"<Response>
<Say>The office is currently closed.</Say>
</Response>"
end
end
Notice we're only looking at the time, not the day of the week. So you'll get calls sent between 8am and 6pm. You may want to make this a little more sophisticated depending on your needs.
You then just need to provide the URL for this application to Twilio. Depending on what tools you have available, you could run this on your own server, or on some cloud service provider such as Heroku, EngineYard, AppFog, etc. Most of these have very good documentation on how to deploy an application.
Hope this helps!

Answer 2

With Twilio functions this is easier now. You don't have to host anything anywhere. Just create a new Function linked to Incoming Voice Call events, then set your provisioned number to call that Function when a new call arrives. Here's a working example you can modify to fit your preferences; it includes dialing extensions but you can remove that if you want.
Note that it doesn't have DST logic and if you want that then you'll have to do some additional work with the moment() library.
https://gist.github.com/ChristopherThorpe/521bfdbd903ac7628ac01f8bb1d651a5
exports.handler = function(context, event, callback) {
const moment = require('moment');
//// Useful for debugging
//const util = require('util');
//console.log(util.inspect(context.getTwilioClient()));
//console.log(util.inspect(event));
// be sure to update numDigits below to match, or delete it for variable length
let phoneBook = {
"888" : "[phone]", // super 8 motel
"666" : "[phone]", // motel 6
"000" : null
};
let callerId = event.Caller; // || "[phone]"; // default caller ID
let digits = event.Digits;
let twiml = new Twilio.twiml.VoiceResponse();
if (digits && phoneBook[digits]) {
twiml.say("Dialing extension " + digits);
twiml.dial({ callerId: callerId }, phoneBook[digits]);
twiml.hangup();
}
// Twilio time is in UTC. This allows 10 am to 7 pm PDT, or 9 am to 6 pm PST, weekdays.
// Twilio doesn't seem to have https://momentjs.com/timezone/ installed.
if ((moment().hour() >= 17 || moment().hour() < 2) && moment().isoWeekday() <= 5) {
let gather = twiml.gather({ numDigits: 3, timeout: 3 });
gather.say("Thank you for calling COMPANY NAME. Please dial your party's extension, or, hold, to leave a message.");
} else {
twiml.say("Thank you for calling COMPANY NAME. You have reached us outside business hours.");
}
twiml.redirect("http://twimlets.com/voicemail?Email=[YOUR-EMAIL]&Message=Please%20leave%20a%20message.&Transcribe=true");
callback(null, twiml);
};