How to send SMS (using Twilio channel) from Microsoft Bot Framework?

Question

Currently my bot is on Facebook messenger, used by employees. I'd like my bot to send one SMS to a person to welcome him / her to our team and with its credentials.

I know Microsoft Bot Framework integrates Twilio, so I integrated Twilio channel following this: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/bot-framework/channel-connect-twilio, so I have a phone, and everything is well configured because I can send manually SMS (from the Twilio's dashboard), it works.

Problem is that I don't know how to use it right now, in the bot.

const confirmPerson = (session, results) => {
  try {
    if (results.response && session.userData.required) {

      // Here I want to send SMS

      session.endDialog('SMS sent ! (TODO)');
    } else {
      session.endDialog('SMS cancelled !');
    }
  } catch (e) {
    console.error(e);
    session.endDialog('I had a problem while sending SMS :/');
  }
};

How to achieve this ?

EDIT: Precision, the person welcoming employee is a coach, just sending SMS from bot with the credentials to use in the webapp the bot connects after first usage by the user welcomed

philnash philnash · Accepted Answer · 2017-09-01T15:31:36

Twilio developer evangelist here.

You can do this in bot framework by sending an ad-hoc proactive message. It seems you'd need to create an address for the user that you want to send messages to though and I can't find in the documentation what an address should look like.

Since you're in a Node environment, you could use Twilio's API wrapper to this though. Just install twilio to your project with:

npm install twilio

Then gather your account credentials and use the module like so:

const Twilio = require('twilio');

const confirmPerson = (session, results) => {
  try {
    if (results.response && session.userData.required) {

      const client = new Twilio('your_account_sid','your_auth_token');

      client.messages.create({
        to: session.userData.phoneNumber,   // or whereever it's stored.
        from: 'your_twilio_number',
        body: 'Your body here'
      }).then(function() {
        session.endDialog('SMS sent ! (TODO)');
      }).catch(function() {
        session.endDialog('SMS could not be sent.');
      })

    } else {
      session.endDialog('SMS cancelled !');
    }
  } catch (e) {
    console.error(e);
    session.endDialog('I had a problem while sending SMS :/');
  }
};

Let me know how this goes.

How to send SMS (using Twilio channel) from Microsoft Bot Framework?

1 Answers