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 …

Twilio Studio is a great tool to build Interactive Voice Response systems (IVRs) to help businesses communicate with their customers.

In Studio, a Flow is executed from an incoming call or SMS to your Twilio number, or you could trigger an outbound flow via a REST API request. Once in a Flow, Studio offers various ways to control calls and message flows, including but not limited to:

• Saying or playing messages to a callee
• Gathering input from the callee such as digits or voice messages
• Making an HTTP request to a third party system

Studio is even able to record audio, which makes it super easy to build a voicemail app for a Twilio number. If, however, …

Many IVRs expect too much from customers - they lack customizability and require your customers to patiently learn how to use the IVR. What if you could replace this with a natural conversational IVR? What if you could add security and personalized customer data and deploy this using multiple channels? 

Well, you can! In this two-part blog post, we’re going to use Twilio APIs as “building blocks” to build an IVR for our pseudo-business, Signal Hardware. Here is the stack:

Layer 1 - Studio and Autopilot

In the first Layer of our IVR we’re using Twilio Studio and Autopilot to give us structure, flexibility and control of our workflow.

Studio is a virtual application builder. It allows you to rapidly create communication flows using pre-built widgets. Autopilot is our Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning platform. Where Studio creates our structure inside of a UI, Autopilot allows us to have …

My octogenarian dad still lives independently.

He does not enjoy his son calling him every night and interrupting his movie-watching. Some nights he's not even at home yet because he's chilling at the pub across the street. He also forgets to charge his cell phone on a regular basis.

These are all the things running through my mind when I want to check in with him and know everything is fine.

What are we going to build

As a software developer, I want my dad to have a button handy where he can "SINGLE click" to tell me "I'm fine, good night" with a text message. After a  "DOUBLE click" I want to receive a text message like "Call me when you have time." When dad gives the button a "LONG click" I want to receive a text message and a voice call with "I need your help now!".

(Sometimes …

If you care about ensuring the safety and comfort of your community, you must have a code of conduct. Writing a code of conduct document is a necessary first step, but it’s not enough. What happens when a violation occurs? You need processes for reporting and responding to code of conduct incidents. Ideally, there are multiple reporting channels so that people can communicate over text or in person. Some folks might not feel comfortable (or be able) to report code of conduct violations face to face.

Decisions Decisions

There are many possibilities for technology to enable text based code of conduct reporting. Laying out requirements will help us narrow down our choices.

• Accessible. Reporting technology should be accessible to as many event attendees as possible. Accessibility here means having access to devices that run the technology, as well as usability for folks with disabilities.
• Secure. Code of …

• Programmable Chat: Autopilot now directly supports Programmable Chat, allowing you to build chatbots for your website or mobile app, or deploy Assistants you’ve already built to Programmable Chat with just a few clicks — existing logic and configuration will work in Chat conversations with zero code changes.
• Autopilot Studio Widget: A new Studio Widget that allows you to directly add Autopilot Assistants to your Studio flows. It also makes handing off messaging interactions from your bot to an agent a lot simpler.

The popularity of chat as a customer support channel has exploded as customers are increasingly interacting with businesses using web and mobile apps and messaging channels like SMS, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. The asynchronous and informal nature of chat has a lot of advantages for customers and businesses. It delivers a better experience to customers by making it easy to contact support. It allows businesses to …

Access to customer context is key to a great customer experience in voice and messaging flows. As it lets you customize your interactions specific to that customer and address their needs promptly.

In this blog post, we will walk through the steps involved in connecting to Salesforce CRM database with Twilio Studio. This means, that when a customer calls into your contact center, in realtime, we can ask the CRM for more details about the caller based on their phone number.  With this additional context, we can present an IVR tailored to their needs or use that information to intelligently route their call.

Before we get started, if you haven’t yet used Studio, I recommend taking a look at this getting started with Studio guide.

Flows in Studio are built with widgets which is a state or transition in our flow. In this post we will mainly use the …

With Twilio Studio and TaskRouter you can quickly customized call flows. This post will walk you through the steps to receive calls on your Twilio phone number and have the callers put into a call queue. The callers will listen to music while the application arranges an agent to take their call. Agents will use their web browser, on their computer, to manage their status: offline and available to accept calls.

When a caller is added into the queue, TaskRouter creates a reservation and then asks an agent if they will accept the call. The agent has the option to Accept and be connected with the caller, or to Reject the call. If the call is rejected, TaskRouter will ask the next available agent.

When the agent accepts the call, TaskRouter will contact the agent based on the agent’s TaskRouter configuration. For example TaskRouter maybe configured to dial the person’s …

Twilio Studio makes it easy to manage voice call flows with its visual user interface. A Studio flow typically starts with a trigger event such as an incoming call to your Twilio phone number. The tutorial Forward Call with Studio has an Incoming Call as the trigger followed by a Connect Call To (forward_call) widget that forwards the call to a person’s phone number (see following screen print). The above flow, adds logic in between the trigger and the forward_call widget. This article is how to add logic using a Studio Run Function widget to call a Twilio Function, followed by a Split widget.

Building logic into the flow gives Studio more power to route calls to various destinations. The example here, is to choose between routing a call to the main office phone during business hours, or to voicemail after business hours.

In the my example …

Turning coffee into some sort of API has probably been the dream of a lot of developers. In fact today marks the 20th birthday of the IETF RFC 2324 suggesting the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP). Last year, together with a friend, I hacked a coffee machine using JavaScript, but what do you do if you want to bring a bit more comfort to coffee served by baristas? Nobody wants to stand in a queue, especially at a conference!

For the last couple of years we’ve started serving coffee at various events using Twilio Barista, combining different Twilio APIs, such as Programmable SMS, Twilio Sync, and other web technologies. This way you can send an SMS to order your coffee, and get notified as soon as your coffee has been prepared by the barista.

On the birthday of the HTCPCP we figured …