Twilio Cookbook 1st edition

266 Pages·2013·1.858 MB·English

by  Roger Stringer

Twilio Cookbook
Over 60 easy-to-follow recipes ranging from walking you
through key features of Twilio's API to building advanced
telephony applications
Roger Stringer
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Twilio Cookbook
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First published: September 2013
Production Reference: 1300813
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78216-606-1
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Cover Image by Abhishek Pandey ([email protected])
Credits
Author Project Coordinator
Roger Stringer Apeksha Chitnis
Reviewer Proofreaders
Jakir Hayder Stephen Copestake
Maria Gould
Acquisition Editors
Rukhsana Khambatta Indexer
Sam Birch Hemangini Bari
Lead Technical Editor Production Coordinator
Dayan Hyames Arvindkumar Gupta
Technical Editors Cover Work
Sharvari H. Baet Arvindkumar Gupta
Jalasha D'costa
Dipika Gaonkar
Aparna Kumari
Copy Editors
Mradula Hegde
Gladson Monteiro
Aditya Nair
Laxmi Subramanian
About the Author
Roger Stringer has been a PHP developer since 2001 and has been working on projects of
all sizes for companies all over the world. He has also formed several startups over the years
and most of them have been powered by Twilio to provide services.
When not working on the Web, Roger can be found reading, cooking, and spending time with
his daughter Kaitlyn at local farmers' markets.
Roger is the founder of The Interviewr, a Twilio-powered startup that makes interviewing
more efficient by helping with scheduling, contact management, and conducting and
recording interviews.
I'd like to thank my wife Patsy and our daughter Kaitlyn for having the
patience to let me get this book written. There were many hours that I spent
behind a computer typing.
Rob and the Twilio crew for answering any questions that came up as I
worked on the various topics covered.
I also want to thank Jason and the crew at Copter Labs and Gary and the
VeriCorder team.
About the Reviewer
Jakir Hayder graduated in Computer Science from South East University and is doing his
MS in Computer Science and Engineering from North South University in Bangladesh. He
has been building websites and social networking apps since 1999. He has been developing
Facebook apps since 2007. He gave his talk at Facebook Developer Garage, Dhaka. He has
developed websites with deep integration with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube
APIs. He writes tests with RSpec, Cucumber, and Capybara with Selenium. He follows Agile
methodologies of software development and is specially fond of scrum and standup.
Besides his full-time job, Jakir writes his blog at blog.jambura.com. He can be followed on
Twitter @jakirhayder and on his LinkedIn profile bd.linkedin.com/in/zakirhyder.
He lives in Bangladesh with his wife Fathema and his son Arham. Currently, Jakir is working as
a Sr. Software Engineer at Cellbazaar, the biggest classified ads site in Bangladesh.
I'd like to thank my wife for taking care of my three-month old boy while I
reviewed the book and did my job. I'd also like to thank Apeksha Chitnis for
being patient with me.
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Table of Contents
Preface 1
Chapter 1: Into the Frying Pan 5
Introduction 5
Adding two-factor voice authentication to verify users 6
Using Twilio SMS to set up two-factor authentication for secure websites 10
Adding order verification 13
Adding the Click-to-Call functionality to your website 15
Recording a phone call 17
Setting up a company directory 21
Setting up Text-to-Speech 26
Chapter 2: Now We're Cooking 31
Introduction 31
Tracking account usage 32
Screening calls 36
Buying a phone number 39
Setting up a voicemail system 42
Building an emergency calling system 45
Chapter 3: Conducting Surveys via SMS 49
Introduction 49
Why use PDO instead of the standard MySQL functions? 50
Letting users subscribe to receive surveys 52
Building a survey tree 54
Sending a survey to your users 58
Adding tracking for each user 60
Listening to user responses and commands 62
Building a chart of responses 64
Table of Contents
Chapter 4: Building a Conference Calling System 69
Introduction 69
Scheduling a conference call 70
Sending an SMS to all participants at the time of the call 74
Starting and recording a conference 76
Joining a conference call from the web browser 80
Monitoring the conference call 84
Muting a participant 88
Chapter 5: Combining Twilio with Other APIs 91
Introduction 91
Searching for local businesses via text 93
Getting the local weather forecast 98
Searching for local movie listings 100
Searching for classifieds 101
Getting local TV listings 102
Searching Google using SMS 104
Searching the stock market 106
Getting the latest headlines 107
Chapter 6: Sending and Receiving SMS Messages 109
Introduction 109
Sending a message from a website 110
Replying to a message from the phone 111
Forwarding SMS messages to another phone number 114
Sending bulk SMS to a list of contacts 117
Tracking orders with SMS 118
Sending and receiving group chats 125
Sending SMS messages in a phone call 129
Monitoring a website 130
Chapter 7: Building a Reminder System 135
Introduction 135
Scheduling reminders via text 136
Getting notified when the time comes 139
Retrieving a list of upcoming reminders 141
Canceling an upcoming reminder 144
Adding another person to a reminder 148
Chapter 8: Building an IVR System 153
Introduction 153
Setting up IVRs 154
Screening and recording calls 158
Logging and reporting calls 160
ii
Table of Contents
Looking up HighriseHQ contacts on incoming calls 163
Getting directions 167
Leaving a message 170
Sending an SMS to your Salesforce.com contacts 176
Chapter 9: Building Your Own PBX 179
Introduction 179
Getting started with PBX 180
Setting up a subaccount for each user 184
Letting a user purchase a custom phone number 187
Allowing users to make calls from their call logs 192
Allowing incoming phone calls 197
Allowing outgoing phone calls 202
Deleting a subaccount 208
Chapter 10: Digging into OpenVBX 215
Introduction 215
Building a call log plugin 216
Building a searchable company directory 218
Collecting Stripe payments 224
Tracking orders 231
Building a caller ID routing plugin 238
Testing call flows 243
Index 249
iii