Book Image

Twilio Cookbook

By : Roger Stringer
Book Image

Twilio Cookbook

By: Roger Stringer

Overview of this book

Have you ever wanted to integrate phone features into a project you were working on? Maybe you wanted to send SMS messages to your customers about the latest sales? Maybe you want to set up a company directory with voice mail? Or maybe you want to add two factor authentication to your web sites to verify your users? Since Twilio was launched in 2007, developers have had a way to do these tasks. The power of Twilio's API is huge and lets you add any type of phone solution to your web site from 2-factor authentication for verifying your users, to setting up a company directory and a voice mail system. The possibilities are endless. "Twilio Cookbook" is your Swiss army knife for Twilio development, providing you with a number of clear step-by-step exercises. It helps you take advantage of the real power of the Twilio API, and gives you a good grounding in using it in your websites. This book looks at the Twilio API, and breaks down the mystery and confusion that surrounds adding telephone functionality to your websites. As you go through the recipes, you will learn how to take advantage of the Twilio API quickly and painlessly. You will learn how to build your own IVR system, company directory, and voicemail box, and also how to set up a 2-factor authentication system to verify users, track orders via SMS, send surveys using SMS, allow users to buy phone numbers, set up and delete sub-accounts, and check to see if a human is answering a phone call. We will also combine Twilio with other APIs to build a handy local search system such as a local business search, movie listings search, and web search. If you want to take advantage of using Twilio's API to add telephone functionality to your websites, then this book is for you. "Twilio Cookbook' will leave you with a black belt in Twilio development and enable you to integrate the API into your websites.

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Twilio Cookbook
Roger Stringer
Sep, 2013 | 266 pages
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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Twilio Cookbook
Twilio Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewer
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Into the Frying Pan
Into the Frying Pan
Introduction
Adding two-factor voice authentication to verify users
Using Twilio SMS to set up two-factor authentication for secure websites
Adding order verification
Adding the Click-to-Call functionality to your website
Recording a phone call
Setting up a company directory
Setting up Text-to-Speech
2
Now We're Cooking
Now We're Cooking
Introduction
Tracking account usage
Screening calls
Buying a phone number
Setting up a voicemail system
Building an emergency calling system
3
Conducting Surveys via SMS
Conducting Surveys via SMS
Introduction
Why use PDO instead of the standard MySQL functions?
Letting users subscribe to receive surveys
Building a survey tree
Sending a survey to your users
Adding tracking for each user
Listening to user responses and commands
Building a chart of responses
4
Building a Conference Calling System
Building a Conference Calling System
Introduction
Scheduling a conference call
Sending an SMS to all participants at the time of the call
Starting and recording a conference
Joining a conference call from the web browser
Monitoring the conference call
Muting a participant
5
Combining Twilio with Other APIs
Combining Twilio with Other APIs
Introduction
Searching for local businesses via text
Getting the local weather forecast
Searching for local movie listings
Searching for classifieds
Getting local TV listings
Searching Google using SMS
Searching the stock market
Getting the latest headlines
6
Sending and Receiving SMS Messages
Sending and Receiving SMS Messages
Introduction
Sending a message from a website
Replying to a message from the phone
Forwarding SMS messages to another phone number
Sending bulk SMS to a list of contacts
Tracking orders with SMS
Sending and receiving group chats
Sending SMS messages in a phone call
Monitoring a website
7
Building a Reminder System
Building a Reminder System
Introduction
Scheduling reminders via text
Getting notified when the time comes
Retrieving a list of upcoming reminders
Canceling an upcoming reminder
Adding another person to a reminder
8
Building an IVR System
Building an IVR System
Introduction
Setting up IVRs
Screening and recording calls
Logging and reporting calls
Looking up HighriseHQ contacts on incoming calls
Getting directions
Leaving a message
Sending an SMS to your Salesforce.com contacts
9
Building Your Own PBX
Building Your Own PBX
Introduction
Getting started with PBX
Setting up a subaccount for each user
Letting a user purchase a custom phone number
Allowing users to make calls from their call logs
Allowing incoming phone calls
Allowing outgoing phone calls
Deleting a subaccount
10
Digging into OpenVBX
Digging into OpenVBX
Introduction
Building a call log plugin
Building a searchable company directory
Collecting Stripe payments
Tracking orders
Building a caller ID routing plugin
Testing call flows
Index
Index

Adding tracking for each user

We want to be able to track each user's response to the survey we sent and this is how we will do that.

In the previous recipe, we stored the phone number, survey ID, and the unique session ID for each person we sent the survey to.

Now we want to store each user's response for tracking later.

Getting ready

The complete source code for this recipe can be found in the Chapter3/ folder.

How to do it...

Let's set up tracker.php that listens for responses from our subscribers using the following steps:

  1. On your web server, create a file and name it tracker.php with the following code:

    <?php
include("config.php");
include("pdo.class.php");
$pdo = Db::singleton();
if( isset($_POST['Body']) ){
  $phone = $_POST['From'];
  $phone = str_replace('+','',$phone);
  $action = strtolower($_POST['Body']);
  $sid = $_POST['SmsSid'];
  $sql = "UPDATE responses SET answer='{$action}' WHERE phone_number='{$phone}' AND sms_sid='{$sid}'";
  $pdo->exec( $sql );
  $msg = "Your answer...
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