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If you're building a mobile application and you need access to the user's contacts you wouldn't give it a second thought, but on the web this feature was missing. The Chrome team saw this gap and got to work on an API that makes users' contacts available to developers with the security and privacy expected on the web. That API is now available in Chrome 80 on Android M or later.
In this post we will investigate the new Contact Picker API and put it to use it in a Twilio Client application to add contact selection for making browser phone calls.
The Contact Picker API
The Contact Picker API consists of the ContactsManager object, available as the contacts property on the navigator object. As it is only supported on Chrome on Android for now, the first thing we should concern ourselves with is checking for support. We can do …
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Twilio Sync is a service provided by Twilio that helps you keep your application state in sync across different services. Specifically, it provides a “stack-agnostic” API that helps you add real-time capabilities to your application.
In this article, we will explore how we can build a custom real-time API analytics tool powered by Sync Lists, a Sync primitive type that helps us synchronize individual JSON objects.
NOTE: You can learn more about Sync Lists and other primitives from the Twilio Sync Object Overview.
Prerequisites
To complete this tutorial you will need the following:
- Laravel CLI, Composer, and npm installed on your computer
- Basic knowledge of Laravel
- Basic knowledge of Vue.js
- A Twilio Account
- cURL or Postman installed to test our API endpoints
Creating the Sample Application
We will generate a fresh application with the Laravel installer and enter into the project directory with:
$ laravel …
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There isn’t much live sport to watch at the moment which gives us the perfect opportunity to analyze historical data about the sport instead! In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to build a basic chatbot for WhatsApp using the Twilio API for WhatsApp and the Flask framework for Python.
The chatbot will allow users to get information about soccer teams and match statistics. Here’s an example showing how it works:
Tutorial requirements
To follow this tutorial you will need the following:
- Python 3.6 or newer. You can download an installer from python.org.
- Flask. We will use this web framework to build an application that responds to incoming WhatsApp messages.
- ngrok. We will use this free utility to connect our Flask application running on our local system to a public URL that Twilio can connect to from the Internet. Installation instructions for your operating system …
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As web developers, we end up creating a ton of login systems, and part of the “create user” flow is invariably verifying that the email address entered by the user is real, and owned by that person.
Typically we'll verify the email address by sending an email to that address with a unique token as a query parameter in a link that the recipient should click. Creating the forms and handling the data entry is relatively easy in PHP; we have libraries and frameworks that can help with these everyday tasks. But nobody wants to configure and maintain a mail server to send out email verification requests.
Luckily for us, Twilio Verify now supports email verification so we can send email verification requests complete with an auto-generated token with a single API call to Twilio. Once our user has clicked the link, we can validate the token is correct with …
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One thing I love about programming is the chance to get creative. There are many cool APIs that help developers make art. This post will go over how to generate text from another text or image, recognize celebrities' faces, colorize photos and videos, and perform neural style transfer using the machine learning library DeepAI.
What is DeepAI?
DeepAI is a platform that aggregates guides such as Separate sampling: its effects and one potential solution, as well as research, data science, a glossary, a newsletter, job listings, and more to increase AI accessibility to both consumers and developers. This post will look at some of its machine learning models and APIs that can help you get creative juices flowing.
They offer language support for JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and C#, and you can also hit the APIs with a cURL request.
Prerequisites
To follow along with this post, make …
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Another conference call, another app, another PIN, another log-in. Joining conference calls should be as simple as dialing a phone number, without needing to enter random conference IDs. In this post, we will walk through how you can build a conference line that anyone can join, using Twilio with C# and ASP.NET Core.
Developer Environment Setup
Let's make sure you have the software you need to build this conference line. For this, you will need:
Create the ASP.NET Core Project
Get started by creating a folder for your project. I'll be using C:\Code\Conference in this post but you can use your preferred project path. Open a command prompt and enter the following commands.
mkdir C:\Code\Conference & cd C:\Code\Conference dotnet new webapi dotnet add package Twilio code . exit
It will create …
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In these unprecedented times of social distancing and a virus pandemic, we are seeing a huge increase in the number of voice calls being made. Our Supernetwork team is working around the clock to ensure that calls make it through. However, in some areas, we are seeing that lines from carriers are so congested that the calls are never reaching Twilio. Here in this tutorial, we will outline some options to bypass the congestion on the PSTN by using Twilio Client.
Twilio Client is a WebRTC based voice client that works in browsers and mobile devices using a data connection. Once a client call is connected to Twilio it can be routed directly to your existing infrastructure via SIP or uncongested PSTN paths allowing calls to continue to flow.
The Idea
Currently, your customers and staff may be struggling to connect to your contact centers or business-critical services because …
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With many people shifting to working remotely, the need for collaboration tools is increasing. Twilio offers many options that allow developers to build collaboration solutions like video chat or voice conferencing solutions.
This blog post walks you through how to create a protected voice conferencing line using Twilio Studio in a couple of minutes - to help your remote workforce continue to communicate.
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
It is simple to build a protected conference line using Twilio Studio and studio …
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You’ve just deployed Flex and you might be asking yourself: what’s next.
Next, you’ll need to start thinking about your routing and queueing strategy. In this blog post, we will cover some basic options for queueing and skilling – it sets the groundwork on how you will report and analyze your contact center business.
Let’s get started!
What We’re Building Today
Flex has the ability to leverage the full power of Twilio TaskRouter. TaskRouter is a powerful attributes-based routing system, the heart of the contact center. It’s also fully programmable, allowing you to control your contact center from your code. We’ll walk through a simple use case today: “How can I setup a contact center to support my customers and employees using Flex?”.
To do this, we are going to build two new Task Queues: Customer Service and Employee Service. These will provide the ability to …
You might be in a position where you urgently need a new contact center that enables your employees to work remotely. This article will guide you through deploying Twilio Flex – a cloud-based contact center with native WebRTC support – in just 30 minutes.
Twilio Flex can be instantly provisioned and provides you the immediate ability to start testing voice calls, SMS, and web-chat. In this blog post, we'll show you how to quickly create a solution that enables contact center agents to work from their homes.
Before We Get Started...
- To get started with the project you will need the following Twilio account. Sign up for a free trial account and get a $10 credit.
Deploy a Remote Agent Contact Center
Now that you are logged into your Twilio account, you’re ready to start setting up a new Flex Instance.
In these next steps, I’ll guide you through creating …