This guide will walk through the initial set up of
Twilio. I will show you how to change
your phone number, even during the free period, if like me you did not choose a
good on in the first place. This guide
will stay simple its your first 15 minute guide and will not go deep, I will
leave that for another guide.
What is twilio ?
First of all you need to remember Twilio has on
"L" not two.
The main site is at https://www.twilio.com/
[1].
Take this explanation with a grain of salt (I am new to
Twilio)
Twilio is a cloud based phone and SMS system. It allows you to obtain a phone number that
you can then program against. For
example you could set up that phone number to send out an email whenever anyone
calls it. You could have it connect to
you when someone calls it and presses "1" and to someone else if they
press "2".
You can have it kick off scripts to run during the
call. You can run a curl script that
will call 12 people and tell them all the soccer game is canceled.
It does all this using, TwiML, API calls, and Twimlets. And it does all this on a pay as you go
basis. Here is a copy of their costs
from the following page https://www.twilio.com/voice/pricing
[6].
The way I read this, is a phone number costs $1/month and
using it costs $0.01-$0.02 per minute (per line, having it forward to your
phone is 2 lines, one in one out)
Signing up for a free trial
Currently, 8/2014, Twilio has a free trial. The details of their free trial can be seen
on this page https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/twilio-basics/how-does-twilios-free-trial-work
[2].
From the site:
When you
sign up for Twilio, you will get a free telephone number. Like all phone
numbers from Twilio, it is “programmable.” You can build a web app that makes
phone calls and sends SMS messages using this number. When people call it,
you can have Twilio answer the call or dial another party. Likewise when,
people send an SMS message to this number, you can have Twilio programmatically
respond, based on directions you give us.
To sign up first go to https://www.twilio.com/
Now click Get Started
Enter your name, email address, set a password, and then
click Get Started.
Enter your phone number and click Text Me. Alternatively you can click on call you
instead and have the service call you.
I chose to have it call me
A confirmation number will be displayed and Twilio will call
you.
Simply enter in the code when prompted.
I posted the audio portion of their verification, click to listen
Click Get Started
Twilio sets up a few nice test to get you started.
Click Make Call. This
will call your phone and speak the message in the text box.
You can hear this audio call at
After the call was complete it gave me an example curl
command to use the API to get the same results.
There seems to be an error in part of the curl command line.
I replaced the URL section with
'Url=http://twimlets.com/echo?Twiml=%3CResponse%3E%3CSay%3EHello+Patrick%2C+welcome+to+Twilio%21%3C%2FSay%3E%3C%2FResponse%3E'
|
I reversed the Url endcoding using http://www.stringfunction.com/url-decode.html
[4]
Click the recieve a call tab.
If you call your Twilio number it will read back to whatever
is in the text.
As an example here is the audio I received back from twilio
When you are done fiddling with these demo tools you can go
to your account.
Fixing your phone
number
If you are like me, you should have chosen a different area
code for your phone number when you started.
If that is the case, you can change it even during the free trial
period.
Twilio has a help page for this process at https://www.twilio.com/help/faq/phone-numbers/how-do-i-cancel-a-number-im-no-longer-using
[3]
The process is simple
First open the Numbers tab.
Click on the number you want to change. (It needs to be released)
In the lower right click Release Number.
Click Release Number.
The number is now deleted (released).
At this point you could "Buy a number", but we
don't want to do that, since we are just testing with our trial.
Instead open up https://www.twilio.com/signup/verify
Enter in your own phone number and have it text you or call
you instead
That seemed to work now I have a new number that is a local
number to me.
Reloading the Numbers page shows the new number. Now I have a Denver, CO number so I don't
have to worry about long distance.
But really who worries about that anymore? I remember when I got my first cell phone
that had unlimited long distance on nights and weekends. I was talking the my grandmother, long
distance, and I had to stop her from cutting me short, and I told her I had
free unlimited calls.
Do something with it!
If you changed your Twilio phone number you can go back to
the demo tools at https://www.twilio.com/signup/success
to test it.
That's it for this write up.
I will write another one covering using TwiML https://www.twilio.com/docs/api/twiml
[5]
References
[1] twilio web site
Accessed 08/2014
[2] How does Twilio’s Free Trial work?
Accessed 08/2014
[3] How do I cancel a number I’m no longer using?
Accessed 08/2014
[4] URL DECODING
Accessed 08/2014
[5] TwiML
Accessed 08/2014
[6] Twilio Pricing Page
Accessed 08/2014
This post is a part of and epic, the pagerduty and twilio epic.
Epic Goal: Set up a phone number, via twillio, that when called will set off a pagerduty event.
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