Twilio Blog

By Brent Schooley 2017-06-22

Twilio Speech Recognition is a powerful addition to voice applications powered by the TwiML verb. Instead of just taking DTMF tones as input you can use the full expressiveness of spoken language in a variety of languages.

We’ll build a hotline that returns facts about cats, numbers, and Chuck Norris to have some fun with this feature and also show its usefulness in interactive voice response (IVR) applications. If you learn best from video or just want to see this in action, this full tutorial is available on the Twilio YouTube channel:

The code for the application is available in this repo on Github.

Hello, How Can I Help You?

We’ll use Twilio Functions to build our application. If you’re new to Twilio Functions you can follow this video tutorial to learn how it works. Since Twilio Functions runs inside the Twilio Runtime there are no prerequisites ...

By Brent Schooley 2017-05-25

More Tools For Your SIGNAL Hackpack v3 Creativity

One of the major themes at SIGNAL 2017 is: “code is creative”. While that theme has been interleaved throughout the sessions, SIGNAL attendees have proven that out in more interactive ways.

Perhaps the biggest display of that on the floor of the conference so far has been the giant LED wall in the Hack Lounge powered by Particle and DeepLocal. The wall can be drawn on by attendees using their hackpack. Here’s a glimpse of some of your handiwork from Day 1 of SIGNAL:

Onward to Day 2

We wanted to make sure you were equipped to hack even harder on Day 2 so we prepared some resources for you. If you want to hack on the Particle firmware that powers your hackpack, first make sure you’ve claimed your device on the Particle site as explained here. Next, head over to the Twilio hackpack v3 firmware repo at ...

By Brent Schooley 2017-01-24

How to Send Daily SMS Reminders Using C#, Azure Functions and Twilio

Are you remembering to keep up with your New Year’s Resolutions? Using C#, Azure Functions and Twilio we’ll build a service that delivers daily SMS reminders to help keep up with those new goals.

Recipe

Here’s a list of the things we’ll use in the creation of our reminder service:

Free Twilio account – sign up for one here
SMS enabled phone number – you can find the perfect one for your needs here
Microsoft Azure account
Visual Studio 2015 (while it is possible to work on Azure Functions directly in the web portal, the developer experience is better in VS2015)
Microsoft Azure SDK for VS 2015
Visual Studio Tools for Azure Functions
Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer

Set up your accounts and install any of the software you don’t have before moving on.

Structuring the Reminder Service

Azure Functions make it easy to quickly create the type ...

By Brent Schooley 2016-12-08

How to Use Swift and Vapor to Generate Twilio Access Tokens

Twilio’s iOS SDKs for Programmable Video, Programmable Chat and Programmable Voice require access tokens to authorize users. Generating these tokens must be done on a server. Rather than learning or using a different programming language on the server, let’s use Swift!

Setting Up the Token Machine

We’ll use the Vapor web framework for Swift and a small helper library to return access tokens from the server. Here are a few things we need for our project:

Swift 3 and Swift Package Manager – this post walks through how to make sure you have these set up correctly
A free Twilio account – sign-up for yours here
Vapor – follow this guide to get Vapor running on your system
TwilioAccessToken and Environment package packages for Swift Package Manager – we’ll add these to our project as dependencies in a moment. The Environment package isn’t essential but it does make working ...

By Brent Schooley 2016-11-01

How to Deploy Vapor Apps to Heroku

Building web applications with Swift using Vapor is super simple. Thankfully, deploying them is also a breeze. In just a few steps we’ll go from localhost to Heroku with Vapor’s CLI.

Prerequisites

We need a few things before we get started:

A working Vapor web application. If you don’t have one, you can follow this tutorial to get started.
Git
A free Heroku account
Heroku Command Line Interface – Make sure to run heroku login once the CLI is installed to authenticate your account.

Deploying to Heroku

Vapor supports deployment to any server that can run Swift. The Vapor CLI tool makes deployment to Heroku super simple.

If your Vapor app is not already in a Git repository we’ll need to add one. Run the following commands from your project directory:

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

Now that we have a Git repo ...

By Brent Schooley 2016-10-31

Getting Started With Vapor: A Swift Web Framework

Web frameworks for Swift started popping up almost as soon as Swift went open source at the end of 2015. Vapor quickly became one of the most used libraries for Swift on the web. In this quick tutorial you’ll learn the basics of using Vapor to build web applications using Swift.

What You’ll Need

Before we take a look at how Vapor works we need to get a few tools.

The first thing we need is Swift 3 with Swift Package Manager. Follow this guide to get Swift running on your system. If you’re on Linux you may find this guide easier to digest than Apple’s site.

You can verify that you have Swift 3.0 or greater by running this command:

swift --version

We also need Vapor. Vapor comes with a command-line interface that simplifies many of the tasks associated with building, running and deploying ...

By Brent Schooley 2016-10-25

Getting Started With Auto Layout for iOS in Xcode 8

Have you ever started an iOS project and opened up Interface Builder and thought: ‘What do all of these buttons and menus do?’ If so, watch this 10-minute video we’ve prepared that covers the basics of Auto Layout for iOS in Xcode 8:

More Auto Layout Resources

If you want to learn more about what was explained in the video, here are some resources from Apple’s Auto Layout Guide that dig further into these concepts:

To learn more advanced Auto Layout techniques, give this list a read:

Size Class Specific Layout – Size classes allow you to vary your user interface layout based on the form factor of the device being used.
Working With Self Sizing Table View Cells – In iOS, you can use Auto Layout to define the height of a table view cell.
Programmatically ...

By Brent Schooley 2016-10-05

How to Send an SMS With Python Using Twilio

All you need to send an SMS with Python using Twilio are the following twelve lines of code:

import os
from twilio.rest import Client


account_sid = os.environ.get('TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID')
auth_token = os.environ.get('TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN')

client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)

client.messages.create(from_=os.environ.get('TWILIO_PHONE_NUMBER'),
                      to=os.environ.get('CELL_PHONE_NUMBER'),
                      body='You just sent an SMS from Python using Twilio!')

If you’d like to see this in action, check out this short video:

More of a Textual Learner? Here’s a Walkthrough

The first thing we need for the above code to work is a Twilio account. Sign up for your free trial account here.

We also need an SMS-enabled phone number. You can search for and buy one in the Twilio console.

Sending an SMS using Twilio is as simple as making an HTTP POST request to the /Messages resource in the Twilio API. Twilio makes ...

By Brent Schooley 2016-09-09

How to Send an SMS With Node.js Using Twilio

Ten lines of code (including whitespace!) is all you need to send an SMS with Node.js using Twilio:

const client = require('twilio')(
  process.env.TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID,
  process.env.TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN
);

client.messages.create({
  from: process.env.TWILIO_PHONE_NUMBER,
  to: process.env.CELL_PHONE_NUMBER,
  body: "You just sent an SMS from Node.js using Twilio!"
}).then((messsage) => console.log(message.sid));

If you’d like a short explanation about how this works, check out this short video:

Prefer a Walkthrough Instead?

The first thing we need for the above code to work is a Twilio account. Sign up for your free trial account here.

We also need an SMS-enabled phone number. You can search for and buy one in the Twilio console.

Sending an SMS using Twilio is as simple as making an HTTP POST request to the /Messages resource in the Twilio API. Twilio makes this super simple by providing a helper ...

By Brent Schooley 2016-09-07

How to Send an SMS With Ruby Using Twilio

Here’s all the code you need to send an SMS with Ruby using Twilio:

require 'twilio-ruby'

client = Twilio::REST::Client.new(
  ENV['TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID'],
  ENV['TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN']
)

client.messages.create(
  from: "[YOUR TWILIO NUMBER]",
  to: "[YOUR CELL PHONE NUMBER]",
  body: "You just sent an SMS from Ruby!"
)

If you’d like a short explanation about how this works, check out this short video:

How About a Walkthrough?

The first thing we need for this to work is a Twilio account. Sign up for your free trial account here.

We also need an SMS-enabled phone number. You can search for and buy one in the Twilio console.

Sending an SMS using Twilio is as simple as making an HTTP POST request to the /Messages resource in the Twilio API. Twilio makes this super simple by providing a helper library. Let’s install the twilio-ruby gem from the terminal:

gem install twilio-ruby ...