July 2021 Summaries

Twilio’s Voice API allows developers to send voice-to-SMS transcripts using TwiML, which processes incoming calls accordingly. The tutorial covers setting up a new Node.js application, installing dependencies, and creating routes for handling incoming requests. It also explains how to use Twilio's Node Helper Library to interact with the API, dotenv to store environment variables, and Express to route and handle incoming requests. The app uses TwiML to transcribe voice messages left by users and sends a callback with the transcription to the /sms endpoint, which then sends the transcription as an SMS to the developer's personal phone number. To test the app, developers need to configure a webhook using ngrok to forward requests from their Twilio number to the local server. Once the app is set up, it can be tested by calling the Twilio number and leaving a message, which should result in receiving an SMS with the transcribed message.

To allow users to upload media files to the cloud, developers can use Twilio Verify to generate one-time passcodes delivered to users' mobile phones and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) to store the files. The application uses Flask to create a web interface that allows users to enter their email address, receive a verification code via SMS or phone call, and upload an image file in .jpg, .png, or .jpeg format. After uploading the file, it is stored in the project directory's "UPLOADS" folder and then uploaded to the S3 bucket using boto3 library. The application also includes measures to protect user data, such as secure password handling and two-factor authentication.

Twilio Flex is being launched with the help of Waterfield Technologies through their new offering, Xcelerate. This solution provides pre-built functionality, implementation, and ongoing managed services to help organizations get started quickly with Twilio Flex. Xcelerate offers a range of features such as skill-based routing, pre-defined activity states, live agent webchat widget, Okta SSO, contextual callback, and canned responses. Waterfield Technologies brings 30+ years of experience in designing digital contact center solutions to the partnership, enabling developers to own their contact center roadmap and use API programmability to build on top of the pre-designed Twilio Flex environment. The solution is designed for customers who want a solid foundation to build on or prefer purchasing a pre-designed solution with ongoing contact center expertise.

To send a WhatsApp message using the Twilio Go Helper Library in 30 seconds, first set up your environment by defining your Twilio account credentials as environment variables. Then, create a new Go project and install the required dependency. Next, write a short Go program to send a WhatsApp message, specifying the "to" and "from" phone numbers and the actual text message. Finally, run the application and send a WhatsApp message using the Twilio client object.

The Ultimate Guide to Omnichannel` is a new resource that aims to help businesses implement effective omnichannel customer engagement strategies. According to Twilio's 2021 State of Customer Engagement report, most businesses plan to add four new customer channels in the coming year, but only one in four businesses are successfully investing in omnichannel personalization. The guide highlights the importance of tracking cross-channel customer journeys and provides infrastructure and tools for a scalable omnichannel strategy. By adopting an omnichannel approach, businesses can deliver hyper-personalized experiences, provide better customer service, and improve internal collaboration by capturing a unified view of customer behavior across all channels.

The integration of Twilio and ServiceNow allows for real-time, bi-directional incident management, enabling employees and customers to communicate on their preferred channel. This integration uses a business rule in ServiceNow to trigger an outbound notification to an assignee via Twilio, who can then respond with comments or resolve the ticket via SMS. The system also escalates to a phone call if the response is not received within 60 seconds. To set up this integration, users need to have access to both platforms and follow specific steps outlined in the provided post, including setting up business rules, Twilio Studio flows, and functions. The integration can be customized to fit specific needs by updating the business rule script or modifying the Twilio Studio flow. With this integration, businesses can provide a better experience for their employees and customers by meeting them on their preferred channel.

The Summer Games are being celebrated by developers at Twilio who have built SMS bots using the company's products, allowing users to learn more about athletes, countries, and events. One bot helps users determine which discontinued Big Games event they might be suited for based on their personality, while another uses comparisons inspired by Olympic athletes to mix up analogies used in everyday conversations. Users can text specific numbers depending on their country to interact with these bots and start comparing themselves to the world's best athletes.

You can dynamically render Svelte components without using if-statements by creating separate child components for each desired format and then choosing which one to render based on a prop value. This approach allows you to keep your styling separate, cut down on messiness, and easily add more post formats in the future. By using Svelte's built-in dynamic rendering feature, `svelte:component`, you can pass the correct child component as a prop to the parent component, allowing for flexible and reusable code.

By default, the Twilio Video React App displays two input fields: one for your name and one for the name of the video room you'd like to join. To prepopulate a video room name so that participants don't have to type it in, you can change the default name via URL parameters or hardcode a value in the application's code. The application uses React Hooks to enable routing and display different pages to the user. By modifying certain components' state variables, such as `roomName` in the `PreJoinScreens` component, you can set the initial room name for video rooms when users navigate to the app. You can also disable the input field for the room name by adding a `disabled` attribute to the `TextField` component.

By Kelley Robinson, 2021-07-27` Best practices for managing retry logic with SMS 2FA are essential to prevent accidental spamming of users, hitting API rate limits, toll fraud, or unnecessary spend. Implementing timeouts on the resend button and adding a buffer between retries can help prevent bad behavior. Tracking retry attempts can also increase the retry buffer with each additional attempt. Additionally, offering alternate channels like Voice on the 3rd verification attempt, displaying a "Call me instead" option in user experience, detecting landlines, disabling unused channels, and implementing reCAPTCHA for voice calls are recommended best practices. General user verification best practices include using Twilio's Lookup API to detect invalid numbers, building an allow or block list of countries, displaying complete phone numbers for initial user verification, masking phone numbers for ongoing login or two-factor authentication, and monitoring support costs and user satisfaction.

This project utilizes the ml5.js library to build a machine learning model that can detect whether someone is wearing a mask in a Twilio Video call. The model uses a pre-trained MobileNet model and Feature Extractor to recognize images of people wearing masks or not. The user can add training data by taking pictures with their webcam, train the model, and then use it to predict whether someone is wearing a mask in real-time during a video call. The project showcases how Twilio's Serverless Toolkit can be used to deploy web apps quickly, including video chat applications, and how machine learning can be integrated into these applications for features like mask detection.

A custom Laravel validation rule was built to validate phone numbers from any country in the world, using Twilio's Lookup API. The rule is encapsulated in a service class that interacts with Twilio's API to verify if a given string forms a valid phone number. A controller class uses this rule to validate phone numbers received through POST requests. The validation logic can be simplified by registering the service as part of Laravel's Service Container, allowing it to be used anywhere in the application through dependency injection.

The Twilio CLI Assets Plugin allows developers to store and manage static assets in a Twilio Assets service from their command line, enabling the use of real recordings in IVR applications. By using the plugin, developers can upload audio files, images, videos, and other media to be used in communication flows such as IVRs, MMS, or WhatsApp conversations. The plugin provides additional capabilities for the Twilio CLI, including the ability to manage static assets and get their URLs, making it easier to customize and build communication flows with real voice recordings.

The tutorial guides users in creating a mobile backend using Supabase, a Postgres database-as-a-service. Users are required to set up two tables, profiles and user_data, to store publicly accessible user data such as username, avatar_url, and website, and the user's metadata including their phone number. The tutorial then instructs users on how to connect the new Supabase database to the Twilio SDK and send each user an SMS notification using Node.js. Users must create a new project in Supabase, initialize the tables, add a new user into the database, create a Node.js app to query each user, install the Twilio SDK, and finally execute the app in their command line. The tutorial concludes by suggesting potential next steps for extending this application, including creating a user interface that allows users to register and automatically populate the database, and providing a front end form using Express.js to send custom messages from the browser.

The article guides developers through building a chat app using Twilio Conversations API and Svelte JavaScript framework. The prerequisites include Node.js, npm or yarn, and a free Twilio account. The backend is used to generate an Access Token that the frontend requests to use the Twilio Conversations JavaScript SDK. The frontend has five components: App, Chat, Conversation, ConversationInput, and Message. The App component controls logging in and retrieving an Access Token, while the Chat component renders all the pieces that make up the chat experience. The ConversationInput component controls typing and sending new messages to the conversation. The Article provides a step-by-step guide on how to create each component, including creating a shared state using Svelte stores, handling user input, and rendering messages in the conversation.

A developer created a tutorial on how to use the Twilio CLI to make kids feel like hackers by sending a text message with a voice recording from a computer, using TwiML and the Twilio CLI. The project uses a text-to-speech engine called Alice to deliver a fun message, such as a song lyric, from Olivia Rodrigo's "The Rose Song". The developer provides step-by-step instructions on how to set up the Twilio CLI environment, create a TwiML Bin, test out hacker skills with Twilio, and experiment with different voices. The project aims to show kids that coding can be fun and creative, and encourages developers to explore more projects with the Twilio CLI.

The Twilio Quick Deploy app is a deployable prototype for automated appointment management with EHR integration, designed to help healthcare provider organizations reduce no-shows and improve scheduling efficiency. The app aims to accelerate the path towards success by providing core building blocks and workflows for basic appointment outreach, integrating with sandbox EHR environments and using Amazon Web Services for cloud-based scheduling. It includes a bi-directional exchange of information between patients and providers, out-of-the-box messages for appointment management, and is intended for prototyping and testing purposes only, not for production use. Twilio's Healthcare and Life Sciences team provides support to help customers launch next-generation patient engagement solutions, and the company has partnerships with other healthcare technology customers that may be a better fit for certain needs.

Twilio's February 2021 service disruption highlighted the importance of ensuring resiliency in engineering, with a broad set of Twilio products impacted by an internal service failure that led to increased server capacity and caching measures being implemented to reduce load on critical services. The company has completed 32 technical improvements since then, including reconfiguring auto-scaling behavior, removing critical paths, and reducing request timeouts, as well as improving deployment tooling and on-call runbooks for better management of server fleet capacity. Additionally, Twilio has published its Software Change Management process and will be publishing updated Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans later this month, with ongoing initiatives aimed at continuously identifying and mitigating risks and introducing new standardized incident management tooling and processes.

You can quickly buy phone numbers from around the world using Twilio's Super Network. You can specify a specific area code to buy a phone number that is local to a certain state, territory, or region. With Twilio Voice, you can integrate voice communication into your applications. To create a proxy phone number, you need to attach logic to it by configuring webhooks on your Twilio phone number. A proxy phone number hides your real phone number and forwards calls to your private phone number. You can also proxy text messages using this setup, which is useful for protecting your privacy when signing up for services or taking phone calls while on air. The process involves buying a Twilio phone number, configuring webhook URLs with Twilio Functions, implementing voice and message proxies, and testing the functionality. To enhance security, you could add passcode functionality to verify whether the call originated from your private phone number or someone else's phone number. This solution works for protecting a single phone number with a single Twilio proxy phone number, but using Twilio Proxy can provide more scalability when needing to proxy multiple phone numbers or create proxies as needed by your application.

This is an SMS price tracker built using Twilio Programmable SMS and Node.js. The application allows users to track the prices of their desired sneakers and receive alerts when the price drops below a certain threshold. The application uses the Sneaks API to retrieve sneaker data and Twilio's Programmable SMS API to send notifications to the user. The application is built using a modular approach, with separate files for handling incoming messages and scheduling tasks. The code includes helper functions for retrieving sneaker data and sending notifications, making it easy to maintain and extend the application.

A Django API is built to handle the Twilio Programmable Voice API, allowing users to make and receive calls from their browser. The application uses React for its front end and leverages the Twilio client library to add WebRTC-powered voice and video calling capabilities. The application allows users to start audio chats and listen in on ongoing conversations. It includes features such as room creation, participant management, and a user-friendly interface.

ngrok is a utility that generates public URLs mapping to local servers, enabling developers to test their Django projects' functionality with external sources by exposing them to the Internet. To use ngrok with Django, install the pyngrok package and add its URL to the `ALLOWED_HOSTS` list in settings.py. Then, start the local server and open a new command line window to start the ngrok tunnel, which exposes both secure (HTTPS) and insecure (HTTP) URLs that forward to localhost:8000. Copy the secure URL and trigger requests from external sources to test your Django app's functionality.

Twilio recently conducted a global "Think Week" initiative, where employees were given a week to focus on personal and professional goals without internal meetings. The idea germinated from recognizing that people are always "on" during virtual work, leading to burnout and lack of deep thinking time. During Think Week, Twilions could disconnect, reprioritize what's important, and work on their terms. Many employees appreciated the opportunity to reflect on challenges and opportunities, and some even reported feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. The initiative is part of Twilio's focus on employee well-being and provides a break from the pressure of being "on" all the time.

Learning a second language and learning to code share similarities in that they both involve immersing oneself in new concepts, overcoming fears of making mistakes, and discovering creative solutions. Both processes benefit from hands-on experience and practical application, rather than solely relying on theoretical knowledge. Making mistakes is an essential part of the learning process in both languages and coding, as it helps identify weaknesses and fosters growth. As language skills are refined, so too can one's ability to express oneself creatively through idiomatic expressions and colloquialisms. Similarly, programming allows for creative problem-solving and logical expression, making it a field accessible to anyone with consistent practice and curiosity. The author's experience as an engineer and technical writer has shown that knowing how to code expands one's horizon and enables meaningful connections globally.

Here's a neutral and interesting summary of the provided text: Building a free 1:1 video chat application with Twilio WebRTC Go and JavaScript allows developers to explore their ideas without worrying about the complexities of building directly on WebRTC. The application consists of two parts: a vanilla JavaScript client-side application that connects to a video room, and an Express server that grants access tokens for participants in the video chat. To get started, create a new directory, install dependencies, set up environment variables, and create an Express server. Use ngrok to connect the Express application to a temporary public URL. Create a user interface with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, including a login form, a join or leave button, and a video preview area. The application uses Twilio Programmable Video to handle connections, disconnections, and track subscriptions for both local and remote participants. Once developed, the application can be tested by navigating to its URL in different browsers or devices, connecting with a different username, and chatting with each other. The possibilities are endless, from tutoring sessions to business calls, and this tutorial provides a solid foundation for building more complex video chat applications.

Twilio and Oracle have joined forces to offer a joint solution for Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) that leverages Microsoft Teams Direct Routing function and combines Twilio Elastic SIP Trunking with Oracle Communications Session Border Controllers. This solution enables users to send and receive Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) phone calls in over 100 countries, offering global coverage, low rates, flexible migration, routing flexibility, simplified operations, and elimination of Cloud Connector Edition. The joint solution is designed for organizations seeking robust, economical, and scalable solutions to improve global communications, providing a competitive edge through cloud platform technology.

** Live video streaming has become increasingly popular, with businesses and individuals using it to connect with audiences virtually. Interactive live streaming has emerged as a key aspect of this trend, allowing audiences to interact with streams through chat, voting, donations, and other means. This format has been adopted by various platforms, including social media channels, event organizers, online shopping platforms, virtual fitness studios, educational institutions, entertainment companies, and even governments. To host successful live streams, it's essential to interact with the audience, choose the right platform, build a suitable setup, check bandwidth, and select interactive components such as text-based chat and polls. A developer-first platform like Twilio Live can provide the necessary tools and support for building top-notch live audio and video applications.

Twilio Live is a platform that allows developers to build interactive live streaming experiences at global scale, providing a low-latency, secure live streaming solution with flexible server-side API primitives and client SDKs for various platforms. It simplifies the build process by offering quick-deploy reference applications for audio-only and video live streaming, enabling virtual events with speakers, audience members, and high interactivity features such as chat and screen sharing. With Twilio Live, developers can create apps for various types of live virtual events, improving their audience's experience beyond simple broadcast and partnering with them to build innovative interactive experiences.

The Twilio Video JavaScript SDK has been enhanced with support for video processors, small effects, and filters that can be applied to the video tracks in a Programmable Video application. A video processor is a small JavaScript object that performs video processing transformations or effects, such as mirroring, converting to black and white, adding watermarks, and performing face detection using Tensorflow. To create a custom video effect, a video processor object is added to the local participant's video track with the addProcessor() method, which applies the processFrame() function to the frames published from that track to other participants in the video call. The article provides code examples for several simple and complex video effects, including mirroring, black and white conversion, adding watermarks, and face detection using Tensorflow.

BYOC is an option offered by most major cloud-based unified communications and contact center providers that allows enterprises to connect to the PSTN via their own SIP trunking provider. This brings more control, lower rates, global coverage, increased quality, and better routing capabilities compared to bundled PSTN connectivity. However, IT managers need to weigh these benefits against potential drawbacks such as increased complexity, multiple service providers, and additional administrative overhead. The choice between BYOC and bundled PSTN connectivity depends on the organization's specific needs and priorities.

Sending SMS with Julia and Twilio` is a tutorial that introduces the programming language Julia, highlighting its unique features such as mathematical expression-like syntax, inline help, and error messages. The author, Matthew Gilliard, provides an interactive learning experience by sharing his own discoveries while exploring the language. He then guides readers through building a simple program to send an SMS using the Twilio API, demonstrating how to work with HTTP requests, parse JSON responses, and handle errors in Julia. Throughout the tutorial, Julia's documentation and online community are praised for their excellence, making it an excellent choice for beginners and experienced developers alike.

Twilio Frontline, a digital relationship builder, is now available in Public Beta. It's a mobile-first application for iOS and Android that helps sales teams and relationship managers build lasting relationships with customers over SMS and WhatsApp, while balancing personal relationships, customization, and privacy. The app combines a pre-built UI with customizable integrations and workflows to provide a secure, multichannel mobile experience for employees and their customers. It's built on the Twilio Conversations API, allowing developers to customize message routing logic, phone number proxying, templated responses, CRM integrations, and more. Frontline addresses the need for compliance, security, and customization in digital communication, making it an excellent application for large organizations needing to meet regulatory requirements. The app prioritizes user experience and sales team productivity, offering features like cross-channel support, rich media, and seamless transfers among team members.

Twilio SendGrid experienced a misconfigured Kubernetes network policy that exposed internal data on several cluster node hosts, including private DKIM keys used for digitally signing emails. The exposure occurred due to a Redis cache cluster being publicly accessible without authentication. Twilio's security team identified and mitigated the issue within hours of receiving it through their Bug Bounty Program. To mitigate further risks, Twilio is rotating exposed DKIM keys automatically for customers with automatic domain authentication configurations and recommending manual key rotation for those using manual security. The incident highlights the importance of regularly reviewing and updating security configurations to prevent similar misconfigurations in the future.

A chatbot is a software application that enables conversation between humans and computers, either in written or spoken form. A simple chatbot can only answer limited questions, while others use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to interact more human-like. The tutorial on building a WhatsApp chatbot with PHP, Mezzio, and Twilio uses the Weather API to retrieve the current weather forecast for any city around the world. The chatbot receives user input through Twilio's WhatsApp service, queries the Weather API, and sends back a nicely formatted response to the user, including temperature, humidity, wind speed, and other relevant details. To develop this chatbot, one needs PHP 7.4, a free Twilio account, Composer installed globally, ngrok, a smartphone with an active phone number and WhatsApp installed, and configuration of the Twilio WhatsApp Sandbox. The application is then built using Mezzio Skeleton, with the required dependencies installed, environment variables registered, and the chatbot's logic implemented using PHP. The chatbot can be started by running Composer serve and ngrok in separate terminal windows, and tested by sending a message to the Twilio number containing the name of the city for which the weather report is needed.

A well-designed messaging architecture is crucial for Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to support their large customer bases while maintaining scalability and reliability. Twilio provides a trusted provider in the telecommunications ecosystem, helping ISVs navigate complexities and avoid common pitfalls. A scalable account structure, subaccounts, sender classification, and design considerations are key components of a robust messaging architecture. Implementing exponential backoff, using message queues, and handling queue overflow errors can help mitigate failures and ensure reliable messaging services. Status callbacks, Debugger Event webhooks, Twilio Functions, Sync, and Event Streams provide additional strategies for error resolution and fallbacks. By understanding these architectural considerations and best practices, ISVs can build supercharged messaging solutions that support their customer engagement needs.

Twilio is a platform that powers communication regardless of the language or framework used for a project. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to send an SMS directly from a Ruby application using Twilio's Ruby Helper Library to make it even faster. To complete the tutorial, you need a free Twilio account, Ruby version 2.7 or later, Bundler, and a smartphone with active service. You also need to get your Twilio phone number, which can be done by purchasing one from the Twilio Console. The Ruby application requires four things: Twilio Account SID, Auth Token, sender's phone number, and recipient's phone number. These are stored as environment variables for convenience. The code is simple, importing the twilio-ruby Gem, initializing a client with the account credentials and phone numbers, creating a message using the `client.messages.create` method, and printing the SMS sid if successful. The tutorial concludes by testing the code and highlighting the potential applications of sending SMS in various projects.

Twilio has added a new feature to its Programmable Video product through the Twilio Video Processors JavaScript library, allowing developers to add video processing filters such as background replacement and blurring to their video streams. This feature is currently only supported in Chrome, but it can be easily integrated into existing applications using Express.js and Node.js. The process of adding a background effect involves creating a new processor instance, loading its model, and attaching it to the video track. Two options are available: blurring the background or replacing it with a picture of choice. Both effects can be applied to local video tracks and will push the processed version of the video stream to other participants in the video call. The complete code for this project is available on GitHub, and developers are encouraged to share their own projects that incorporate this feature.

The Assets Plugin for the Twilio CLI allows developers to create and manage assets such as images or audio files that can be used in Twilio applications. The plugin abstracts away the Twilio Functions and Assets API, making it easy to upload and use static assets with a single command. It provides commands for initializing, uploading, listing, and managing assets, and is part of the Twilio Serverless Toolkit. The plugin is open source and can be used by developers to simplify their workflow and integrate with Twilio's infrastructure.