Twilio

Simple Conferencing

Conferencing is common and useful voice application. A conference allows the audio of two or more callers to be bridged. Twilio's API lets you build simple conferences that just bridge audio or complex large moderated multiuser conference bridges.

Concepts

Twilio exposes the conferencing functionality through the Dial verb. Rather than dialing a phone number and talking to one other party, you can instead use the Conference noun and dial a conference room where you can speak to and hear all the other parties who Dialed the conference room with the same name.

Download

simple-conference.zip

Implementation

Twilio implements the most common conference room functionality by default. By simply dialing a conference with the same name under the same Twilio account, multiple callers can now be bridged.

• Twilio receives first incoming call and requests simple.xml1
• Web server responds, causing Twilio to connect first call to conference2
• Twilio receives second call and also requests simple.xml3
• Web server responds, causing Twilio to connect second call the conference4

• 1

  • Twilio receives an incoming call from the first participant and requests simple.xml

• 2

  • The web server responds with

    howtos/simple-conference/simple.xml

    <Response>
        <Say>Joining a conference room</Say>
        <Dial>
            <Conference>MyRoom</Conference>
        </Dial>
    </Response>

    This code causes the first participant to join a conference room called "MyRoom". By default, the first participant will be muted and hear the default hold music while they wait for more people to join the conference.

• 3

  • Twilio receives an incoming call from the second participant and also requests simple.xml

• 4

  • The web server responds with

    howtos/simple-conference/simple.xml

    <Response>
        <Say>Joining a conference room</Say>
        <Dial>
            <Conference>MyRoom</Conference>
        </Dial>
    </Response>

    This code causes the second person to join the conference "MyRoom". By default, when the second participant joins, the hold music ends, a beep is played, and the conference starts, allowing the two participants to speak to each other.

Other examples

For a more detailed walk through of conferencing features, see:

Moderated Conferencing How-To Conference TwiML Conference REST Resources