July 2014 Summaries

Twilio Voice + SMS has been successfully implemented at Arkansas Children's Hospital, reducing no-show appointment rates by 2% in just a few months. The hospital previously spent millions on ineffective solutions to reach patients, but found the flexibility and power of Twilio's communication tools to be a game-changer. With proactive appointment alerts using Twilio Voice and SMS, patients are now more likely to show up for their appointments, saving the hospital time and money. Arkansas Children's Hospital is now exploring further expansion of its SMS integration, hoping to continue reducing costs and improving patient experiences.

MovingCompanies.com is a platform that aims to connect clients with quality movers by providing a search engine that filters out unqualified movers, allowing users to find and assess reputable movers based on their specific needs. The company uses Twilio Voice to screen calls from potential clients, ensuring they are routed directly to the mover's phone number without unnecessary follow-up calls or holds. By leveraging this technology, MovingCompanies.com aims to save clients time and hassle in finding reliable moving services.

A tutorial on creating a Click-to-Call service using Twilio Client and Pusher with Python and Flask, allowing customers to click a link and start an in-browser voice call with a human, while passing contextual information about the customer to the person handling the call. The service uses TwiML to generate instructions for Twilio to connect the caller to a specific user, and Pusher to publish events and update the backend view in real-time.

A developer is building an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system using Twilio and Django. The system will use a Twilio phone number to route callers through different options, with the response determined by the digits entered by the caller. The IVR system will be built using the django-twilio library, which simplifies the process of integrating Twilio with Django. To build the system, the developer will need to create a new Django project, install the django-twilio library, and configure the Twilio phone number to route calls to a specific URL. The developer will then write code to handle the incoming requests from Twilio, using TwiML (Twilio Markup Language) to generate responses based on the user's input. The system will be tested by making a call to the Twilio phone number and entering different digits to see how the response is generated.

Chartio has partnered with Twilio to integrate their communication metrics into its platform, allowing users to easily access and visualize key performance indicators for their Twilio-based businesses. By connecting to Chartio, Twilio users can gain a deeper understanding of their SMS and voice usage, as well as other essential business metrics. This integration enables users to measure the success of their marketing campaigns and make data-driven decisions faster. With Chartio's dashboard, users can customize which metrics they want to track and control the layout of reports, providing a one-stop shop for their Twilio metrics.

Twilio is inviting users to join them on a road trip across Poland, visiting local startups and meetups in six cities, including Berlin, Poznan, Warsaw, Krakow, and others. The trip will take place from July 21st to July 26th, with various events and activities planned for each day, such as meetups, hackathons, and networking sessions. The road trip is an opportunity to connect with local startups, tech teams, and industry experts, including Twilio's own team members, who will be sharing their experiences and insights along the way. Users can follow the journey on social media using the hashtag #TwilioPl and contact the road trip team for more information.

Josh Anderson, CEO of Acuity Technologies, used Twilio to identify the failure points in a Florida county's phone system that was causing inefficiencies in voter registration, ID verification, and polling station statistics reporting. With only four lines of code, he ran a load test that simulated 14 hours of high traffic during election season, pinpointing issues with the telecom provider's SIP trunks and carrier capacity. By resolving these discrepancies, Josh saved the county thousands of dollars, improved communication between carriers and telecom providers, and bridged the gap for voters to access information about polling stations. The load test was a "hammer test" that used Twilio Queue to mimic real-time calls on election day, allowing Josh to troubleshoot issues with minimal cost - under $20.

Twilio has launched Twilio CX For Chromebooks, a communications platform packed inside a Chromebook, as part of the #CXRoadshow. The launch was announced by Jeff Lawson at a keynote event alongside Google and other software companies. The platform aims to improve business operations by making customers happy through enhanced customer experience. The #CXRoadshow showcased talks, pictures, and announcements from various locations including Atlanta, London, Chicago, New York, Santa Monica, and San Francisco.

WatchOverMe is a mobile watchdog app founded by Xin Chi, which was launched in 2012 with the goal of protecting users from danger. The app initially served as a personal bodyguard, alerting family and friends when a user was in danger, but now focuses on a more proactive approach to prevent potential dangers through video recording and data mining. With over 140,000 users, WatchOverMe has become a popular app that uses Twilio SMS to send alerts and track locations via GPS. The app's expansion into proactive safety features, such as alerting users of areas they should avoid, is based on data scraping from crime reports, statistics, and social media hashtags, with the goal of empowering users to take control of their personal safety.

MyMind is a self-referral community providing accessible and affordable mental health care in Ireland, founded in 2006, which has expanded to three more spaces with a fourth city on its horizon. The organization aims to offer mental health services to those who need them, bypassing the expensive and challenging referral process. With the help of Twilio's cloud communications technology, MyMind is able to provide high-quality, cost-effective communications with their target client base, facilitating people's access to mental health services without delay and at an affordable cost. Currently, they are providing over 1,000 appointments per month, and the number keeps growing as they expand their reach and increase their positive impact on people's mental health in Ireland. MyMind is committed to empowering clients to book appointments online or by phone, and also provides online support via their platform, as well as a workplace program to enhance staff resilience and wellbeing. The organization is now looking to expand to Galway next year and is open to collaborating with technology experts like those at Twilio to maximize their positive impact.

The #TwilioRecipe Contest Winners have been announced, with three winners sharing their favorite Twilio recipes for screening incoming calls and receiving Monit Notifications via SMS. The contest aimed to encourage developers to share their experiences with Twilio, a popular VOIP service provider. The winners will receive Twilio swag, both editions of the Twilio Cookbook, and other prizes. The recipes showcased by the winners can be found on the Twilio website, providing inspiration for others to create innovative applications using the platform.

Telerivet is a platform that makes it easy for anyone to build and deploy mobile messaging services, without huge upfront investments of time or money. It uses Twilio Voice and SMS to power its virtual phone numbers and SMS services globally, and offers an Android SMS gateway app in countries without Twilio virtual numbers. By providing a simple and accessible way to create SMS services, Telerivet is helping nonprofits and organizations like Farm Radio International to focus on their mission-critical issues, such as tackling food scarcity and eradicating food insecurity. The platform's Rules Engine allows users to set up "if this then that" style commands without writing code, making it accessible to non-technical users, while also providing an API for more technical users to write custom code. Telerivet sees a huge opportunity in the rapidly growing mobile messaging needs of organizations worldwide and is committed to supporting them by making SMS as simple and accessible as possible.

In this article, Devin Rader explains the concept of using HTTP cookies to track SMS conversations in Twilio applications. He begins by explaining how cookies work in a typical web browser/web server scenario and then shows how Twilio uses cookies differently. The author then builds a simple conversation tracking app using Flask and the Twilio Python helper library, demonstrating how to use persistent cookies to store state between messages. Additionally, he discusses using session data instead of cookies for larger amounts of transient data. Finally, Rader addresses scenarios where an application initiates a conversation by sending an initial SMS message using Twilio's REST API, highlighting why traditional cookie-based approaches won't work in these cases. Throughout the article, the author emphasizes that Twilio is a well-behaved HTTP client, and techniques used for cookies on websites can be applied to Twilio applications with minimal modifications.

Twilio Client Javascript SDK v1.2 is now available, extending the reach of browser-based communications internationally with new Global Low Latency (GLL) support and offering easier use across different browsers, including Firefox. The update provides a better call experience by minimizing latency and media routing, allowing for local media conditions and great conversations wherever in the world users are deploying Twilio Client. With GLL, media is routed to the closest data center, reducing geographic distance and hops over the public internet, controlled by app logic from a single centralized place.