Containers are one of the many ways food is shipped to vendors around the globe. The food encounters various types of environmental changes before it reaches the consumer. These environmental changes could impact the quality of the product during the shipment. 

Using Twilio’s Narrowband Developer Kit that was distributed at SIGNAL 2018 we will create a full-stack IoT prototype using the U.S. T-Mobile NB-IoT network. NB-IoT is a new radio network technology that has very minimal power requirements meaning devices can connect with a lifespan of 10 years in the wild. This environmental monitor will be used to track the temperature/humidity of a food shipment and infrequently send small packets of data to update a web application.

Hardware Requirements

• Twilio Developer Kit from T-Mobile Narrowband
• Twilio Narrowband SIM
• LTE Antenna
• Micro USB cable
• Lithium Battery
• Seeed Studio Temperature and Humidity sensor

Software Requirements

• Arduino IDE
• Twilio Breakout ...

NB-IoT, also known as Narrowband-IoT, is a new cellular technology that promises low cost, low power consumption, wide area coverage and long battery life. These characteristics help make “smart devices” a reality.

T-Mobile has deployed NB-IoT coverage in the United States and Twilio is the first company to provide a NB-IoT developer kit. Twilio’s Alfa Developer Kit features a development board created in collaboration with Seeed Studio. The development board can access the T-Mobile NB-IoT network using a Twilio Narrowband SIM (which comes in the kit). Once on the network, developers can exchange data between multiple NB-IoT kits using the Twilio Breakout SDK.

This post demonstrates how to connect to T-Mobile’s NB-IoT network using Twilio’s Developer Kit. Once connected, we’ll send a “hello world” message over the network using the Breakout SDK. You can also find the the completed project on GitHub under TwilioIoT.

Ready to ...

When it came to my Grandma 90th birthday I was stumped about what to get her as a gift. She has been a big influence in my life and I wanted to do something that showed that. I knew I wanted to integrate Twilio in some way because when she was younger she was a switchboard operator for Bell Telephone. Then it hit me like a ton of phones. I will create a hardware device with a Programmable Wireless SIM and a Grove Button. When grandma presses the Grove Button a voice call will be routed to her phone and an operator will tell her how much I love her and wish her a happy birthday. 

What I needed to send some birthday love

For this project you will need following components:

• Twilio SIM
• Twilio Phone Number
• TwiML Bins
• Wio LTE Cat.1 board by Seeed Studio
• LTE Antenna
• Lithium ...

• Studio, Twilio’s visual development environment is now Generally Available.
• New pricing — Studio for every communication use case.
• More messaging channels — Build chatbots for Facebook Messenger, LINE, WhatsApp, and many more.
• Flow Editor For Flex— Studio is integrated with Twilio Flex, a programmable contact center and supports TaskRouter-based applications.

At Twilio, we understand developers because we are developers. And we know that while you rock at writing code, you’d probably much rather write the code that counts than spend time on server maintenance, complex state management and dealing with scale issues as your use cases grow. That’s why we developed Twilio Studio — a visual development environment that makes it easier than ever to create and deploy new customer experiences using messaging and voice in no time.

Today we are moving Twilio Studio into General Availability

On the ramp from beta to GA, we made some significant enhancements. We ...

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 ...

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 flow, Business_hours ...

We’re thrilled to announce support for LINE, enabling you to deliver rich, interactive messaging experiences on one of the most popular messaging apps in the world. LINE has native support for interactive message formats like rich cards as well as sharing images, audio and video files.

Over the last 10 years, developers have used Programmable SMS to build incredibly innovative messaging experiences for their users, whether that’s a personal shopping concierge, improving patient care through regular communication or helping millions of people avoid parking tickets.  

With Twilio Channels, developers can use this same API to build these messaging experiences on RCS, Facebook Messenger and starting today, LINE. By using the Rich Messaging Extensions to the Programmable SMS API, they can also leverage the rich capabilities of these channels by simply including additional parameters in the API request.

Twilio Channels also work seamlessly with Twilio Studio, a visual drag-and-drop ...

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 it’s time to teach ...

Last time I visited my grandma, she was quite –rightfully– upset with the fact that one of the telephone services she’s been using for decades had been disabled without notice.

Her daily routine for the past few decades has been to dial a number provided by her phone company every morning and be greeted with that day’s weather forecast. Said service would give her just enough to know what to wear and whether to bring an umbrella or not so she could get on with her day.

The millennial inside me very quickly came up with the “I’ll just get her an Amazon Echo” solution, but the idea fell flat when I realised her house doesn’t have WiFi. Even if it did, I would be effectively volunteering for eternal family support on that device.

So I took a step back and decided to build her the ...