Voice posts
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Surveys serve as a great tool for gathering information from a sample of people and can take multiple forms but are most common in the form of a questionnaire, either written, online or over the phone.
In this tutorial, I’m going to walk us through how to build an automated Phone Survey System which is a form of an Interactive voice response (IVR) system. An IVR system is a technology that allows a computer to interact with humans through the use of voice and DTMF tone input via the phone’s keypad. To build this application, I will be working with the Twilio Python Helper Library, the Flask framework for Python and Google Sheets. Below is a high-level overview of how the application works:
For the purpose of building this application, I have selected the following three questions to include in the survey:
- Do you own or rent a house? …
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We've seen how to build a conference line and then protect it with a static passcode. However, passcodes can be guessed or leaked, especially if they are reused over time. An alternative is to make a list of numbers that are permitted to join the call. But, since spoofing phone numbers is relatively easy, this still may not protect you.
A one-time passcode (OTP) sent to a caller's phone or email, can verify they are who they say they are and increase the security of your conference line once more.
In this post we will take the Rails application we previously developed and add a conference line secured in two ways. We will:
- Ensure that the caller is a known participant by checking their caller ID against a list of permitted phone numbers
- Send them an OTP using Twilio Verify which they then have to enter correctly to ensure …
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We are thrilled to announce the beta release of the Voice Diagnostics Web App and the accompanying RTC Diagnostics SDK and Client JS SDK's Device.testPreflight. These tools are designed to simplify checking for browser calling readiness and diagnosing network related issues. Today, they are available in beta and they are open source.
A typical VoIP service requires many connected parts to work together flawlessly. The Voice Diagnostics Web App and SDK help with checking for VoIP calling readiness
Twilio Programmable Voice and WebRTC capable browsers have paved the path for VoIP and contact center service providers to implement cheaper and more engaging calling experiences compared to …
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In a recent blog post, about building a dial-in podcast service, I looked at accessibility; specifically, at how the trusty telephone brings us all closer, and can even make podcasts available to all, without expecting everyone to embrace computers and the internet.
Now, it's great to cater for a non-technical audience or those who don’t have internet access, but what if the person providing the dial-in service is a bit of a techno-phobe too or is simply busy with other things (e.g. local business owners)? Or: what if you can see the potential of Twilio phone numbers for your business or club or charity, but can't afford to employ a programmer to put your ideas into practice.
Your club secretary or church or local library – along with thousands of small businesses in the area – might have all sorts of information which they want to publicise, but …
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School closures, emergency notifications, and severe weather alerts are examples of time-sensitive automated phone calls that consumers care about. However, creating notification solutions can be difficult. We often find organizations face roadblocks while developing flexible solutions that scale to accommodate high-volumes or new regions, reliably. Building these types of solutions takes time and careful consideration. To aid in developer education, we are excited to announce that we are open sourcing a Voice Notification App built in ReactJS for the Web. This reference app can be deployed to Heroku in minutes and demonstrates how to leverage Programmable Voice APIs to create a voice notification system to make calls to your customers to deliver time-sensitive messages.
You can use this reference app as a starting point for your voice notification use case.
This application is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. See the source code repo here: https://github.com/twilio/twilio-voice-notification-app
Features overview …
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When you are developing an application that uses Twilio services you need to expose your webhooks on public URLs that can be reached by Twilio. If you have followed some of the tutorials that we published on this blog you know that we recommend using the excellent ngrok tool to generate temporary public URLs for your development web server. Ngrok is an incredibly useful tool that creates a tunnel from a URL on the ngrok.io domain to your application running on your computer. You can then configure your webhook using the ngrok URL and when Twilio sends a request to it, ngrok redirects it to your application.
If you use ngrok frequently enough, it pays off to become a paid customer, which allows you to secure a permanent URL. But if you only use this service occasionally, it is tedious to have to log into the Twilio Console to …
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The tech incubator Level39 is situated in the heart of London’s Canary Wharf district, occupying four floors of the One Canada Square building, the third tallest skyscraper in Britain.
On an average day, more than 1,200 people pass through Level39’s doors to work at one of the 200 businesses located there. Level39 will welcome another 300 daily visitors: guests of member businesses, event attendees, and diners at its bar and restaurant.
It’s a lot to manage.
“If you imagine it, we've got six front of house staff,” said Qaunain Meghjee, head of technology at Level39. “It’s myself, different members of the tech team, and colleagues from other teams — all ensuring everything runs smoothly across our multiple floors.”
It’s important to make sure that only the right people have access to the right places in Level39’s facilities. Each of the 200 member businesses has its own staff with its …
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Remote work is an extremely popular term these days. How to go about working remotely, though, is another story.
Luckily, in just a few steps, you can build a simple and efficient remote application setup using the SIP protocol and Twilio's Programmable Voice Platform.
Organizations are looking to implement the following solutions for remote work:
- Softphones for voice and video chat
- Build IVRs and remote agent communications through SIP
- Audio Conferencing and remote meetings
The New Normal
The world has changed quite a bit in the past 90 days. Shelter in place and social distancing orders have made it challenging for employees and employers to stay productive. Businesses are facing critical challenges adapting to remote work and managing apps for remote workers. One of the biggest challenges for remote workers is staying connected without the resources available to employees in an office environment.
In order to set up a …
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Twilio Conference uses a jitter buffer to smooth out irregularity in media packet arrival times when mixing audio for conference participants. This buffer results in fewer audio artifacts, but introduces a fixed delay for the audio of each participant.
If a participant suffers from extremely high jitter (commonly seen using applications or browsers on WiFi networks), the jitter buffer may swell to compensate, causing their media to be significantly delayed. Once the jitter buffer has grown, it will not shrink - even if the jitter is eliminated on the media stream. At sizes greater than ~250ms the jitter buffer can be perceived by the participants as audio latency.
Twilio customers have communicated their interest in gaining visibility into the jitter buffer behavior and gaining programmatic means to control it. With this in mind we have added a jitterBufferSize parameter to conferences that allows the buffer setting to be configured enabling …
I read a great article recently about accessibility. It stressed that it’s important to cater for those who either don’t have a computer or who, quite frankly, find computers and the internet too daunting. And then I thought about the current trend to move everything online, from shopping to social events; and, more recently, even church services!
Imagine a world in which all your neighbors for miles around get together for church services several times a week, but you can’t take part. They don’t deliberately exclude you, but for whatever reason, you can’t join in.
It’s unthinkable, isn’t it?
However, in these days of social distancing and lockdown and online everything, that’s exactly the predicament we face. Sadly, this is a situation where those who are isolated – due to frailty, illness, poverty, or other reasons – have always found themselves.
Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be that …