Interface / service to easily respond to text messages - user-interface

I am curious if there is a simple interface or service I can subscribe to that would allow me to respond to incoming SMS pretty easily? Right now I am just using a simple TwiML script to forward to another number. But I can't respond and I'm getting 3 to 5 spam texts a week that I would love to respond STOP to, but I don't have an easy interface to do that with. Any suggestions?

Related

How do I notify users on Slack that aren't in the channel?

What we are trying to do
I am working on automation which posts messages to a Slack channel using Incoming Webhooks on a custom Slack App. The messages mentions people.
What works
We can send a message just fine, it has formatted content, and usernames are correctly resolved using the link-names flag.
What isn't working
The whole point of the notification is to inform a dynamic set of people about something they should care about. The set of people we tag varies hugely (think people who contributed to a pull request) and so not all possible recipients are in the channel these automated messages go to.
We assumed that given the usernames are being directly #-mentioned, they would be notified by Slack. However, two of the users we've tested with and #-mentioned confirm they never received a notification they had been tagged.
This is different to "human" behaviour, where if you #-mention someone in Slack, you get a little message reminding you that person isn't in this channel and offers to invite them or let them know.
As far as we can tell, sending the message programmatically is doing the equivalent of "Do nothing" in the picture above. I want to do either of the other two options, preferably "Let them know".
How can I notify people they've been mentioned? I've looked at all the API documentation and nothing discusses notifying users who aren't in the channel that they are mentioned.
This can't be an uncommon issue.... right?
Notes:
We aren't directly calling chat.postMessage, it's just the only documentation on link_names I could find to link to. We are using Incoming Webhooks, which has minimal documentation on the parameters - it seems to be the same as chat.postMessage.
We would prefer not to move off Incoming Webhooks, but we can do a custom integration with the API if we have to.
You need to invite the user to the channel first, using the Python client that's:
client.channels_invite(
channel=channel_id,
user=user_id
)

How to make Slack app send a private message via an incoming webhook to someone specific?

I created a Slack app that sends a series of interactive messages to a channel. In my Slack API dashboard, I see that I can create and remove hooks. Right now the hook url that I have set up in my code is the one for the Slackbot channel.
But the problem is that such a message only gets sent to me.
I want to send the Slackbot messages to Alice in situation A, and to Bob in situation B. Not just to myself, the guy who configured the app.
What's the best way to do this?
I would suggest that you should not use hooks for this. A more sane way to do this right would be via chat.postMessage Web API method which is documented here!
This is because hooks are tied to specific conversations and that approach quickly hits a wall on what it can really achieve, especially messaging different people. Once you start using the web API it's pretty simple. Just ask for the scope during app installation (remember to add that scope in your dashboard), subscribe to the event in your API dashboard and then you are good to go.
Everytime you send a message via that method, Slack will send you a payload which you can use for testing and logging etc.
You can see all the different ways to message programmatically inside Slack here.

Is it posible to send multiple message to Google Home through DialogFlow?

On facebook Chatbot or others platform we can send message directly to the user.
So for one question we can send multiple answer.
Now, that i'm developing for Google Home, I need to do the same.
I didn't find this opttion.
Dialogflow HTTP call to my server is the only output available.
So is there anything i missed to send message back to user in case I have a multiple messages answer?
(Or do I have to bufferise very message my hook creates before sending it back?)
Thanks
The conversation model for the Google Assistant is different - you can only send a message to the user in response to the user sending you a message. You can only send a single response, but it may have multiple parts (up to two Simple responses, containing messages, plus other features such as cards and carousels).
If you need to send multiple things back - you may need to rethink how you're doing it or how much you're sending back at a time. The Assistant is primarily for audible responses, and a long audible response is generally not a good UX.

Creating a Slackbot that adds

Hey in my team's slack (messaging system for those who don't know) we have an automatic response, so that when anyone says "trump", slackbot automatically responds with "the wall just got ten feet higher". Now I want to make a counter that essentially allows slackbot to state "the wall just got ten feet higher, wall height:(have a updated value according to number of times "trump" has been stated)" So basically I want a way to have a value that updates the wall height but I am lost on how to do that within slackbot. Any help is much appreciated, thanks to all!
The default features provided by Slackbot only allows it to respond to keywords, but not much more. So to provide that additional feature you would need to develop a custom bot.
For your use case I would recommend building a so called internal integration for Slack using the Events API.
Internal integration allows you to add custom functions for your Slack team only (as opposed to a full fledged Slack app, that could also be installed and used for other Slack teams).
The Events API allows you to set up a bot that listens to messages and can react to keywords like "trump".
An alternative approach to the events API would be the outgoing webhook. However this function is now deprecated and should no longer be used. Also it only works with public channels.
To set this up you will need to develop a small webservice (e.g. in PHP) that listens on a webserver for requests from the events API, keeps count of how many times the keyword has been invoked in the past and sends an appropriate message back to your Slack team every time the keyword is used.
I can recommend reading the excellent official Slack API documentation if you want to learn more.
If you are familiar with PHP this can be done easily using the Slackbot Framework. It supports Events API allowing you to listen to messages in channels or direct messages (depending on the permission scopes of your APP). So all the conversations on Slack can be sent to your server and you can search for the specific keyword in every message. Then send back an appropriate message to Slack. In summary, the first step is to create an APP for your slack team at https://api.slack.com/apps?new_app=1. Next step is to install the Slackbot Framework which is explained here. Hope this is helpful.
That can also be done by integrating custom slack bot using Django. You'll have to subscribe events and based on events, Slack will send conversation message to the given url, and based on the event, you can write your logic to increase count and post message back to slack work space.

Sending and SMS from your computer

There is a ton of data on this subject where you simply take the phone-number+#mobile-carrier.com and send a message, that is not what I am looking to do.
I want to send an SMS, from the command line, in this case, using php, but I would be happy to use bash, and will probably make it into an app or plug in for Safari eventually. Right now, a test case would suit me fine.
I would like to do something like this:
./sms 619-555-1212 "this is the message"
I don't need to receive the message back to the computer, this is a sending only agent.
The criteria that makes all the data I find on this not work, is that I want my correct from: number to show up. I have tried using the email gateway method and changing he from: headers, but it appears they are stripped at the gateway.
I don't mind paying a service to give me certain amount of SMS credits to make this happen. I want to avoid any hardware, where I would have to get a modem or otherwise to connect to my computer.
If I do use a service, something with an example of how to do so within their API would greatly appreciated. I feel this should take me no more than 15 minutes, but I am hours into research and not getting very far with all the little scripts out there that do nothing close to what I want to do.
Thank you very much and sorry that I don't understand this protocol to the best of my ability.
You can send with Twilio using cURL very easily since sending SMS is a simple POST request with three parameters. Here's an example of a bash script that makes calls but could be modified to use the SMS API instead. http://labs.twilio.com/bash/
(I work at Twilio)
you will need sms gateway like http://www.clickatell.com/ for that
You can use any gateway that charges you a few cents for every message sent. They have a simple REST API which requires a very little coding. They even provide you a sample example to get started.

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