Code, Tutorials and Hacks
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My son just started kindergarten and his first year of not being homeschooled. To say that everyone was nervous was an understatement. Luckily, his school is filled with caring people who aren’t afraid to embrace technology for efficient communication (and calming nervous parents).
There we were, running errands after his drop-off and our phone was alerted with an email including a photo and message of his progress. The personal touch of being able to see him relaxed calmed our anxiety, allowing us to enjoy the remainder of our afternoon.
No matter how much we advance technology, it’s my opinion that we must find ways to include “human touch” as much as possible, even if it’s automated.
This got me thinking about how else I would like to be contacted by his school, especially in case of an emergency. Wouldn’t it be cool if, instead of 160 characters, I could receive …
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At Tarjimly, we provide free on-demand translation services for refugees and people in need of humanitarian service. We are supported by the Twilio.org Impact Fund, as we are a tech nonprofit tackling the world’s toughest problems through the power of communications.
Using Twilio Programmable Voice, our new feature allows translators and aid workers to add additional people to two-way calls (for example, a lawyer or a doctor who can give advice remotely.) While you can do this with a regular conference call, we allow the experience to feel like a regular call to the end-user – backed by a robust infrastructure in the backend supporting up to 250 people on the line.
In this guide, we aim to take your existing VoIP two-user call capability and build a robust infrastructure that can handle dialing in other users – using only their phone numbers.
This guide will focus on …
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With Google Sheets (online spreadsheet app from Google) you can easily collaborate in real-time with coworkers, clients, or others. The structure and simplicity of keeping data in rows and columns brings many benefits.
WhatsApp is a popular app for smartphones that offers a replacement to traditional text messaging systems. It allows you to send messages to another person who is also using WhatsApp. You can send simple text messages and you can also send attachments containing pictures, audio clips or video recordings.
In this post, you will learn how to create a Node.js application which can be used to send WhatsApp messages to multiple recipients. It uses a Google Sheets spreadsheet as the data source for contacts and Twilio's API for WhatsApp to send the messages.
We'll take an iterative approach building this application. Let's start with a name and call it "A Message Sender".
What you'll need
- A Google …
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With Twilio Media Streams, you can now extend the capabilities of your Twilio-powered voice application with real time access to the raw audio stream of phone calls. For example, we can build tools that transcribe the speech from a phone call live into a browser window, run sentiment analysis of the speech on a phone call or even use voice biometrics to identify individuals.
This blog post will guide you step-by-step through transcribing speech from a phone call into text, live in the browser using Twilio and Google Speech-to-Text with Node.js.
If you want to skip the step-by-step instructions, you can clone my Github Repository and follow the ReadMe to get setup.
Requirements
Before we can get started, you’ll need to make sure to have:
- A Free Twilio Account
- A Google Cloud Account
- Installed ngrok
- Installed the Twilio CLI
Setting up the Local Server
Twilio Media Streams use the WebSocket …
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SMS Chatbots provide a great way to engage with volunteers and deliver information about different initiatives you want to promote. They’re widely accessible (no Internet needed!) and with tools like Twilio Studio, designing the flow of interactions becomes a delightful experience.
As part of SIGNAL 2019, one of our main goals at Twilio.org was to increase awareness of some of the organizations and initiatives we have been supporting, while at the same time provide an instance for people interested in volunteering to get more information about different opportunities to get involved.
To achieve this, we built an app using Studio and linked it to a Short Code that allowed us to have SMS based interactions with the thousands of people in attendance during the 2nd-day keynote at Signal, as well as everyone that was following through the live stream.
This is the story of what we did, how we …
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Using Polly, the resilience framework for .NET, you can gracefully handle lost packets, thrown exceptions, and failed requests which inevitably make their way into service-to-service communications on the web. Polly provides resilience strategies for your apps through policies such as Retry, WaitAndRetry, and CircuitBreaker, enabling you to implement fault tolerance in your distributed systems in a fluent fashion.
This post will introduce you to the Fallback policy and demonstrate its use in a straightforward ASP.NET Core 2.1 example. It will guide you in using the Fallback policy to handle failures you cannot recover from: when all else fails, fallback to this last line of defense.
If you’re not already familiar with Polly, the first post in this series on the Twilio blog introduced Polly, the .NET resilience framework. The second post build on the first and introduced the HttpClientFactory.
Prerequisites
To follow along with this post you need: …
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As the Labor Day weekend dwindles in the rear-view mirror we’re forced to confront reality: we’ll have to bid farewell to the felicities of summer and gear up for a new school year. It’s a bittersweet ritual of the season.
For .NET web developers there’s a significant new entry in the course catalog: Microsoft is moving ASP.NET Core 3.0 to general availability. The big announcement is set for September 23rd at .NET Conf 2019.
Haven’t bought your tickets yet?
No problem! .NET Conf is virtual this year, so everyone will be attending in the same class of service: no terrorizing cab rides, no standing in long lines, and no taking off your shoes unless you want to get comfortable.
If you feel the need to share the experience with your fellow techies in meatspace there are local events scheduled around the world. For UK developers, Twilio’s own Layla Porter …
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If you’re reading this, you’ve probably grappled with impostor syndrome at one time or another.
Experience doesn’t always help, either. As our skills grow, we tackle harder problems. Technologists are always working at the edge of our knowledge.
What can we do to fight impostor syndrome? Studies have shown that self-affirmation can counteract negative ruminations and increase achievement. So I decided to build an Internet of Things button that delivers an SMS affirmation when pressed.
Physical responses to negative thoughts
Why use hardware to fight imposter syndrome?
This project could totally be a web application. But – taking a physical action in response to negative thoughts helps ground me emotionally.
Using SMS lets me receive the affirmation without the cognitive load of opening another browser tab. Twilio’s IoT capabilities let me take the button anywhere with cell service. No WiFi configuration required!
The imposter syndrome button was my first hardware …
There’s nothing worse than being stuck on the trains in London during rush hour when there are delays. Summer is wrapping up in London, but if you want to get a really cheap sauna experience, just head onto the Central Line during peak rush hours on a day when there are train delays. I know this because my miserable self has been trapped, sweltering on a tube with an armpit in my face, more times than I care to remember.
If only there was a way that I could get a daily warning about the status of the tube lines I use to get to work every day. Well, thanks to Azure functions, Twilio SMS Output Bindings and the handy Transport for London (TFL) API I can make that a reality.
Before We Begin
Before we get started, this is what you need:
- A Free Azure Account
- An Azure …
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Networking is a skill that everyone needs, especially if you are an entrepreneur or plan on being one. A strong professional connection can help take your business to the next level. Those connections can provide solutions to the complex problems you’re facing, expand your customer base, and much more. Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, networking is a proven method to career and economic advancement.
The easiest way to create this connection is by attending local events in your city and interacting with people physically. I can’t count the number of times I have googled the keywords “events near me” only to see a lot of irrelevant results, not to mention the noise of ads. The events that are relevant are either in a faraway city or in another country altogether.
In this tutorial, we are going to implement a simple app that sends daily SMS notifications of events happening …