Receiving messages back to my platform - sms

Use Case SMS leaves my platform and goes out to a receiver (SMS). I would like to attach some sort of custom identifier so when the user responds back to the SMS..and my platform received the message..I know how to internally route the response back in my platform.
Any ideas?

Maybe set up a system where when the code is sent out
For instance:
Code - 11832
The user then has to enter this code on your website. A program will then match to see if it's the identical code. So you are then able to log the information
No expert on this though and Where is your code ?

Twilio evangelist here.
There isn't really a great way to attach an identifier to the message itself. You could force the user to prepend/append a code in their reply, but depending on your specific scenario that might not be a great user experience.
Another option is to save the to/from phone number as a unique pair when you send the message. Then as your application receives replies you can check the incoming to/from phone number against what you saved.
Hope that helps.

Related

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.

Need suggestions in getting the conversation details

I am creating a bot using MS Bot framework - NodeJs. The below information needs to be captured for logging (Using the bot.use method i.e. IMiddleware).
Receive:
a. UserId
b. UserInput (text)
c. ConversationId
Send:
1. Name of Intent or dialog name that handled this (that handled the user input text)
2. Bot output text
3. ConversationId
4. UserId
I am unable to get the required detail for the 'send'. Can anyone provide me some suggestions on this.
Thanks.
I believe your main struggle is to log the name of intent or dialog. You won't know it in your send middleware if you haven't captured it during the routing phase. Once the Bot Framework figured out where to send the incoming message, it just invokes that function.
These two articles may help you get what you want. Just recently I played with capturing the conversation's breadcrumbs and also logging a full transcript:
http://www.pveller.com/smarter-conversations-part-3-breadcrumbs/
http://www.pveller.com/smarter-conversations-part-4-transcript/
If you need to build a reliable capture engine, I would suggest that you didn't use the session.privateConversationData like I did and instead built your own storage/log infrastructure to push the events to. Just stream them out with a timestamp and conversationId and reconcile on the other end later. The asynchronous nature of everything the bot framework does internally will be haunting you along the way so that's why. Plus, once you scale out beyond testing on a few users and your bot spans multiple processes, you will be out of the single-threaded event loop.

Twilio Call Masking Similar to Uber

I need to use twilio call masking similar to how uber does. I need to grab and available number and attach it to a transaction for a period of time. I got basic TwimXML working to deliver a message but how do I connect two numbers on the fly?
I'm working in iOS and Android with Parse.com serving as a temporary back end. Since these are mobile applications I'm hoping to use the native telephone and messaging applications.
My assumption is that I need to grab a number from the number pool. Assign a forwarding number to it. And return that number to my application in the success block of the promise. Then send that number to the telephone/message app. The part I'm not sure about is how to set up a forwarding number on my Twilio number with the rest api.
Any direction here would be greatly appreciated.
Twilio developer evangelist here.
Your assumptions are mostly correct, but as you point out, you're missing the bit about assigning the forwarding number.
If you've used TwiML to reply to an incoming message you are on the way though.
What you need is an endpoint that you can set as the Voice URL for the number you purchase through Twilio. With that endpoint you need to return TwiML that forwards the call onto the right number. That TwiML would look a bit like this:
<Response>
<Dial>
<Number>ONWARD_NUMBER</Number>
</Dial>
</Response>
In order to return that TwiML, you would need to set up a relationship in your database between the two users' phone numbers and the Twilio phone number such that when you receive a call from one of the numbers to the Twilio number, you can look up the other number in the database and use that in the forwarding TwiML.
That is a brief description of how this is supposed to work. There is a longer description of how to achieve this sort of system in our Masked Phone Numbers tutorial. Sadly the tutorial is not currently available in Node.js, but if you read through the instructions you should be able to follow the flow of the application.
Let me know if this helps at all.

Replying to certain message in Twilio

I am making an event organisation platform. Whenever user creates an event, the candidate gets an email notification as well as sms notification asking whether the suggested time fits or not. The problem is that since it is event organisation, there may be more than one occurance of candidate's mobile phone. So I need to have some unique information to identify to which event candidate is responding to.
I have tried identify using Message SID, but then I realised that Message SID is different on reply message.
So my question would be: is there any way to authenticate to which message candidate is replying to?
Hi Twilio developer evangelist here.
Because every message is idempotent, you wouldn't be able to track them just via the call sid. however, there's way to get around that such as passing a code that goes with each message which you can then read, or using cookies.
I think you are probably going to be more successful using cookies, and luckily enough there is an article on twilio's website that describes just how to do that. And because I noticed you're using PHP, I'm pointing you directly to the PHP article on tracking SMS conversations.
Hope this helps you

Connecting a 'sent' SMS to a 'received' SMS

I have built an app that sends out an SMS using the twilio number(the one assigned to me) when a message is sent I receive the SID number which is inserted into the db, along with some other general information, however I do not know how to connect the received SMS SID to the sent SMS SID that tells the system that user has responded....how does someone connect the outgoing message to what is received?
UPDATE:
Hello Devin, Thanks for the response! however, this does not help me much as I might send lets say one of three different people multiple messages in an hour.
my app is a notification app...basically it is a form that a user fills out with some basic info. one of these fileds they choose is a drop down of three different people(who the message will go to) they send the message. my app then inserts the form data explained above along with the SMSID that is returned by you guys into a DB.
the user(one of the three people descibed above) that was sent the notification above responds to the message, meaning that Twilio hits my "Request URL" and I save all the information that is returned by the user...however, and where the problem actually lies is that the SMSID for that reply is not the same as the SMSID of the sent notification...therefore I have no way to connect the SMS that was sent to the user with their response. I have looked at the cookies option and that is not what I am needing...actually your documentation actually acknowledges this issue but does not offer a solution as seen here under "Application Initiated Conversations"
https://www.twilio.com/blog/2014/07/the-definitive-guide-to-sms-conversation-tracking.html
So if you know of a way around this, I would love to hear it for sure :)
Twilio evangelist here.
The SMS protocol has no concept of a "conversation". Each message sent is unique and has no knowledge of messages sent before or after it. Twilios SMS Sid is simply a unique identifier for an individual message.
The typical way to solve this is to use the To/From phone number pair as the unique identifier of an SMS conversation. When you send your first outbound message, store the To/From phone number in your database. When the user replies Twilio will tell you what number they sent the message to and from and you can use that information to look up the original outbound message in your database.
If a "user" can be involved in several different conversations at once you either need to use a unique phone number for each seperate conversation (allowing you to use the technique above), or you need to have the user include some type of conversation ID in their reply (which you can use as the unique identifier).
You can buy a pool of numbers and as each conversation "ends", recycle the number for a new conversation.
Hope that helps.

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