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.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Twilio Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Searching Google using SMS


Want to just search the Web for something? This last recipe will let you do just that. This recipe will let us use the "search" keyword to trigger a search in Google and return the top three search results.

To do this, we're going to build a Custom Search Engine and also use Google's API.

Getting ready

The complete source code for this recipe can be found in the Chapter5/ folder.

How to do it...

And now, the big one. We will now add Google search to our local search system.

  1. Get your Google API key from https://code.google.com/apis/console.

  2. Go to http://www.google.com/cse/ and create a Custom Search Engine. We want it to search the entire Internet, so make sure you do the following:

    • In the Sites to Search field, feel free to enter any domain; we will delete it later

    • Head to the Setup tab under Edit search engine. In the Sites to Search drop-down list, select Search the entire web but emphasize included sites

    • Select the domain name that you entered on the list and delete...