I am trying to test a service. I need Twilio to receive SMS from specific SMS service provider. When the sender sends with a number I can receive the message. But when the sender user SenderID like 'RZ SMS' I can not receive the message. The structure of the message in both situations is the same.
Has anybody faced this problem before?
Twilio developer evangelist here.
It is not possible to respond to SMS messages sent from an alphanumeric ID. You also cannot initiate messages to an alphanumeric ID. Please see more details on alphanumeric sender IDs here: https://support.twilio.com/hc/en-us/articles/223181348-Getting-started-with-Alphanumeric-Sender-ID
Related
We are using Twilio for sending outbound message to our customers.
When we send Outbound SMS to Customer then we are storing Outbound message details in our Database.
Also we have implemented Inbound SMS. So if we receive any inbound SMS from customer then we are creating inbound message record in database.
Now our requirement is that if sent a sms to Customer and then customer replied to that outbound message then we have need to store Inbound SMS under Outbound SMS, so we can relate inbound message with Outbound message.
Is there any way to identify in twilio that inbound message that we have received is related to which Outbound message (may be can we use any unique identifier)?
Thanks,
Raj
Twilio developer evangelist here.
There is no affordance in SMS to reply to specific messages. You can see this yourself by opening your SMS app on your phone and trying to reply to the second to last message you received from someone. It's simply not possible.
So, you can either make the assumption that if you have sent a message to a user that their next inbound message to your number is in response to that.
Or, you can use multiple numbers to send different messages, associating responses based on the number that sent/received the message.
Hope that helps.
Full disclosure I work at Till Mobile.
I believe you can achieve this using our A2P SMS platform (which happens to utilize Twilio).
Till creates a unique id for the to and from phone number combination when an outbound message is sent.
When an inbound message is received it is tagged with the same unique id. In the Till API this id is called the project_launch_guid.
Using the Till API
You can get a free username and api_key via https://tillmobile.com/
Send the outbound message
curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST -d '{
"phone": ["phone_number"],
"questions" : [{
"text": "Welcome to the customer appreciation program. If you have a question please respond.",
"webhook": "http://requestb.in/1ilpbfd1"
}]
}' "https://platform.tillmobile.com/api/send?username=username&api_key=api_key"
Which returns
{
"project_launch_guid": "some_guid",
...
}
Retrieve the inbound message
If a user later responds the message will be POST'd to the webhook defined above in this format including the same project_launch_guid returned from the send:
{
"project_launch_guid": "some_guid",
"participant_guid": "585897f2-2c30-43f5-8f6b-7c243e8ac4b0",
"participant_phone_number": "phone_number",
"question_guid": "685897f2-2c30-43f5-8f6b-7c243e8ac4b0",
"question_text": "Welcome to the customer appreciation program. If you have a question please respond.",
"result_guid": "885897f2-2c30-43f5-8f6b-7c243e8ac4b0",
"result_timestamp": "2016-11-27T11:57:14.060474",
"result_answer": "How do I redeem my points?",
...
}
Note: the webhook is optional. If it is not provided the inbound message can be retrieved via our results API:
curl "https://platform.tillmobile.com/api/results?username=username&api_key=api_key&project_launch_guid=some_guid"
Using either the webhook or results API the project_launch_guid can be used to tie the outbound and inbound messages together. The result_answer attribute value will contain the user's inbound message.
FYI We treat each send like a session. They persist indefinitely unless another send is created with the same to and from phone numbers. In that case the second send is queued behind the first and a configurable TTL is set on the first.
We have more documentation available here https://till.readme.io/docs/
Don't hesitate to let me know how we can assist further.
When we send sms from twilio then we want to set reply to phone number.
So if they reply to the outbound message then incoming message will be received by agent not the twilio number form which we are sending sms.
Thanks,
Rajendra
Twilio developer evangelist here.
I'm afraid there is no concept of a "reply-to" phone number in SMS messages. The recipient of a message can reply to the number that sent the message to them.
If you are looking to try to connect users directly through a Twilio number, I recommend you check out the Twilio Masked Number tutorial (that links to the PHP version, but there are other language versions of the tutorial). It will show you how to use a pool of numbers so that you can maintain a relationship between an agent and a user.
Let me know if that helps at all.
I am sending SMS using Twilio API. During testing i found that it sometimes delivered message to the phone number but does not sends all the time. This is the case of DND activated numbers(Do Not Call List).
I knew this is because of Sender routing done by Twilio. When Twilio sends SMS using a number(only numeric sender-FROM), i received the message, but when it sends message using some alphanumeric sender(like DM-044138), it does not delivers the message.
Now my question is do we have any access to change this ? Can we set something that could guarantee the delivery even for the DND numbers ?
Any help would be highly appreciated.
Your problem is you are sending it to India.
Please review the following.
This feature is only available when sending messages to supported countries
As you can see from the list below India is not a supported country.
https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/sms/what-countries-does-twilio-support-alphanumeric-sender-id
I am new to Twilio API.I have trial account and I have sent Message using Twilio Rest API successfully and received message from number i.e Message as:DM-062107 and body :- Sent from your Twilio trial Account-Hello.
Now I can't able to reply this message.can any one help me to how I can reply to this and how I know that message is received.
I have contacted to Twilio technical support for same problem and get the response. Check the reason why reply option is not enabled:
Although Twilio supports sending outbound messages internationally using toll-free numbers, your Indian number may not support sending inbound messages to US toll-free numbers. I will recommend checking with your mobile carrier to see if sending messages to US toll-free numbers is supported. If not, I will recommend using a regular US number instead of a US toll-free number and kindly retest.
Twilio Evangelist here.
So, to reply to message you just send a normal SMS from your phone to the number. The way Twilio handles this is using a 'webhook'.
If you log into your Twilio account, click on the 'Number' tab, you'll see you have a telephone number there (the same one you sent an SMS with):
Once you've clicked on the number, you'll see a screen with some other details:
Here you can configure your webhook. This is basically a URL that Twilio will send your message to. So if you configure that to point to the URL of some application you have written, you'll receive an HTTP Post or Get request (you can configure which) with the contents of the message, who it is from, etc.
You can then reply to this message with Twiml, which is just XML:
<Response>
<Message>
This is the message that is sent in reply!
</Message>
</Response>
And using this you can build up a conversation!
There are a lot of details on Twilio's website with quick starts etc. There is even a video that talks it through.
Hope this helps.
I would like to send a text message survey (eg. "How happy were you with X service? Reply 1 for satisified, Reply 2 for not satisfied") to multiple recipients. From the responses, I would like to create a report on the recipients that responded 1 vs the ones that responded 2. What is the best way to do this with the Twilio API? Does my app need to store the results from my incoming SMS message or does Twilio store these so I can query the results? If the former is the case and TwiML is involved, how do I parse the response and store the result? Thanks!
** Disclaimer: Twilio evangelist here **
Chirag:
So it sounds like you have two requirements here:
Use Twilio to send outbound text messages to different recipients
Capture a users reply to that message
For the first requirement, you can start by going to Twilio.com and signing up for a new account. Its free to start and we give you a Twilio phone number you can use to start to build your app. Once you have the Twilio phone number, you can use the REST API to start sending outbound text messages from that Twilio phone number. We have a quickstart that shows you how to do this:
http://www.twilio.com/docs/quickstart/php/sms/sending-via-rest
Note that this link goes to the PHP sample, but you can use the drop down at the top of the page to pick from other stacks like .NET, Java, Python or Ruby.
Once you've sent an outbound message you need to capture the replies to that message (your second requirement). Twilio uses something called a webhook to notify you about incoming SMS messages.
A webhook is basically a URL exposed by your application and associated with your Twilio phone number. You can configure the URL associated with your phone number in the Twilio dashboard.
Each time we receive an incoming SMS message on your Twilio phone number, we will make an HTTP request to that URL. As part of that HTTP request we send along metadata about the inbound message like the phone number that the message was sent from and the Body of the message. The full list of parameters we send is here:
http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/twiml/sms/twilio_request
Now your app can pull those parameters out of the request and do whatever it wants with them. Since we already are sending the body of the message as we receive it, Tims suggestion of tracking the responses based on the From parameter and storing the message body in your own database is a good suggestion.
This quickstart shows receving an incoming text message, grabbing the From parameter and then responding by sending back from TwiML:
http://www.twilio.com/docs/quickstart/php/sms/replying-to-sms-messages
In your case, if you don't want to reply to the incoming message, just omit the TwiML response.
Hope the helps. Lets me know if you need more info.
Devin
Track the responses using the From parameter (and using Body to identify the selection). Yes, Twilio stores those messages, and you could query the API - but it's likely better to just store it in your own database.