How to evaluate an SMS API provider

Virtually every business can enhance their relationships with their customers by taking advantage of SMS text messaging to stay in touch. Consider some possible use cases:

• Order status updates
• Delivery and shipping notifications
• Financial transaction alerts
• Appointment reminders
• Two-factor authentication and password resets

What about your business? Bet you’ve already thought of a way to use text messaging, and you want to consider how to start a pilot project — or maybe you already use an SMS API, but you want to add a second one for fault tolerance. Now you need to decide what SMS API provider to use.

The simple answer is: use Plivo. But if you’re one of those troublesome people who won’t settle for simple answers and require evidence before making a decision, we’ve put together a guide to choosing an SMS API provider. It walks you through the evaluation process, from figuring out how you want to use text messaging to highlighting the features you should look for. This post gives you a taste of the contents, but you should download the guide for the full story.

What to look for

Focus your evaluation on a few broad factors about each platform: features, geographic reach, and pricing.

By features, we’re talking about support for Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS), long code numbers (including 10DLC), short codes, and toll-free numbers, as well as things like rate limiting and message queuing, support for GSM and Unicode characters and smart encoding, and long message concatenation.

Geographic reach is an obvious factor. Your platform should be able to send messages to every country and region where you might have customers — and where you might have them in the future. Just to be on the safe side, look for a partner with a global presence, including relationships with in-country Tier 1 carriers with direct interconnectivity to local telecom network operators.

And while pricing isn’t necessarily your primary purchase criterion, it’s something everyone has to deal with. Look for transparent pricing, published on the vendor’s website. If you compare other platforms’ rates with Plivo’s prices, you’ll find we’re generally lower across the board.

The best SMS API

Features, reach, and pricing are important factors to consider. Check out our guide for details on those factors and more, then compare SMS API platforms. We think you’ll come to the conclusion that Plivo’s your best choice. Get started today for free.

Authentication is a critical business function because it allows organizations to keep their systems safe. Only authorized users should be able to access protected resources, including data and computing services.

Since computing systems first came online they’ve employed user IDs and passwords to authenticate users, but with today’s powerful systems in the hands of hackers, passwords are easier than ever to crack, potentially leaving systems vulnerable to unauthorized users.

To increase security, organizations often turn to two-factor authentication (2FA), a process that requires users to provide a second form of authorization. That other factor might be something users have (such as a hardware token like a Titan Security Key or Yubikey), something that’s part of them (like a fingerprint, voiceprint, or facial image), or something they know (like the answer to a security question). Many organizations use SMS to get that second factor: Users enter a password and the authentication process sends them a code via SMS that they have to enter in order to get access. This ensures that the person logging in is the person holding the authorized user’s mobile device.

To implement 2FA, businesses integrate their applications with a communications platform — nowadays generally a cloud communications platform, also known as communications platform as a service (CPaaS). These systems provide APIs that developers can add to their applications to integrate sending and receiving text messages for 2FA and many other use cases.

But SMS platforms aren’t bulletproof. Sometimes a CPaaS provider’s messages have trouble getting through to the users that depend on them — and when you’re talking about a critical service like authentication, dropped and delayed text messages are critical failures.

You can make your SMS-based 2FA process more fault-tolerant by taking advantage of a second 2FA provider. That way, if one service fails to deliver, you can quickly switch to the second, which is unlikely to be subject to the same faults. (Disclaimer: Availability of second provider not guaranteed in the event of a global thermonuclear war.)

If you already use a cloud communications platform to power your 2FA process, we suggest you add Plivo as a secondary provider. Plivo offers a 99.99% service-level agreement (SLA) — and earned an overall satisfaction score of 92 on G2’s latest cloud communications report, making us the highest-rated cloud communication platforms on the market.

See for yourself how easy it is to add Plivo to your portfolio of communications tools. Sign up for free today.

Your company has settled on Plivo to handle its voice and messaging communications, and now it’s your job to start integrating Plivo into your company’s applications. Don’t worry — Plivo has a Node.js SDK to help you out. You can use it write Node.js applications that send and receive SMS messages.

In this guide, we’ll outline the steps for getting set up to use Node.js and Express.js in Plivo’s SMS API. Start by setting up your Node.js environment and connecting your Plivo account. We’ve also got code snippets for you to leverage to send and receive messaging through our SMS API. By the end, you'll be ready to leverage SMS communication for notifications, alerts, or even two-way interactions in Node.js.

Prerequisites

To send SMS with Node.js, you need the following elements in place: 

• A Plivo account - If you don't have one already, sign up with your work email address. 
• Install Node
• Install Plivo’s Node SDK
• Install the Express framework.

If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Node.js development environment. Once you’re completed these steps, carry on to learn how to send SMS in Node.js.

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Send SMS in Node.js

Create a file called SendSMS.js and paste this code into it.

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let plivo = require('plivo');
let client = new plivo.Client('auth_id', 'auth_token');

client.messages.create({
    src: '<sender_id>',
    dst: '<destination_number>',
    text: 'Hello, world!'
}).then(function(message_created) {
    console.log(message_created)
});

Replace the auth placeholders with actual values from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234). In countries other than the US and Canada you can use a sender ID for the message source. You must have a Plivo phone number to send messages to the US or Canada; you can rent a Plivo number from Phone Numbers >Buy Numbers on the Plivo console or via the Numbers API. Save the file and run it.

$ node SendSMS.js

Note: If you’re using a Plivo Trial account, you can send messages only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.

Receive SMS in Node.js

Of course, sending messages is only half of the equation. Plivo supports receiving SMS text messages in many countries (see our SMS API coverage page and click on the countries you’re interested in). When someone sends an SMS message to a Plivo phone number, you can receive it on your server by setting a Message URL in your Plivo application. Plivo will send the message along with other parameters to your Message URL.

Create a file called receive_sms.js (or whatever name you like) and paste into it this code.

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const express = require('express');
const bodyParser = require('body-parser');
const app = express();

app.use(bodyParser.urlencoded({
    extended: true
}));
app.use(function (req, response, next) {
    response.contentType('application/xml');
    next();
});
app.set('port', (process.env.PORT || 3000));
app.all('/receive_sms/', function (request, response) {
    let from_number = request.body.From || request.query.From;
    let to_number = request.body.To || request.query.To;
    let text = request.body.Text || request.query.Text;
    //Print the message
    console.log('Message received - From: ' + from_number + ', To: ' + to_number + ', Text: ' + text);
});
app.listen(app.get('port'), function () {
    console.log('Node app is running on port', app.get('port'));
});

Save the file and run it.

You should then be able to see your basic server app in action on http://localhost:3000/receive_sms/.

That’s fine for testing, but it’s not much good if you can’t connect to the internet to receive incoming messages and handle callbacks. For that, we recommend using ngrok, which exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels. Install it and run ngrok on the command line, specifying the port that hosts the application on which you want to receive messages.

Ngrok will display a forwarding link that you can use as a webhook to access your local server using the public network.

Now you can create an application to receive SMS messages (follow our Quickstart guide for details).

Why use Node.js to send and receive SMS

Node.js's event-driven, non-blocking architecture is well-suited for handling SMS communications. It excels at handling multiple concurrent SMS requests without blocking the application and can efficiently manage high volumes of SMS traffic. 

Applications that use Node.js for backend benefit from all the pros of full-stack JavaScript development, including better efficiency, code sharing and reusability, speed, and productivity. Node.js is well-suited for applications requiring real-time SMS interactions, such as two-factor authentication or live chat.

Get started with Plivo to send SMS in Node.js

That’s all there is to sending and receiving SMS messages using Plivo’s Node.js SDK. 

Don’t use Node.js? Don’t worry — we have SDKs for Java, Python, PHP, Ruby, .NET Core, .NET Framework, and Go.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and only takes 5 minutes. Sign up today.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to move many customer interactions into remote, mobile, and virtual channels — a process that was already underway, but that has accelerated in the last year. Many businesses now use SMS messaging, which gives companies a direct, automated, scalable, and cost-effective way to reach mobile customers in real time.

Businesses frequently automate voice interactions along with SMS. In addition to providing more personalized service than text messaging, voice can act as a backup communications channel, providing services if anything goes wrong with SMS.

That notion of having a backup is a good one. In addition to having a backup channel, you should also have a backup communication platform — a second SMS and voice provider, to ensure that your mission-critical communications channels stay up and running.

Network outages happen, and when they do, you want to be sure that your customers can still receive messages and critical information, and can access their accounts using two-factor authentication and one-time passwords — a common use case for SMS.

Multicloud CPaaS

Many organizations add fault tolerance to their IaaS and PaaS platforms by using multiple providers. In a report based on the 451 Research Voice of the Enterprise (VOTE) survey, 451 Senior Analyst Raul Castanon says, “As mainstream enterprise adoption continues to grow, we expect CPaaS will mirror key trends driving the evolution of the larger IaaS/PaaS market.” In a joint webinar with Plivo he reinforced that notion, saying, “CPaaS remains a fragmented space, highlighting the complexities in delivering real-time communications. Multicloud CPaaS can address challenges related to resiliency, scalability, coverage, and regulation.”

A multivendor approach reduces the risk of you going silent on your customers, but it has other benefits as well. Chief among them is cost savings. A multivendor approach lets you lower your total cost of ownership by using the provider that has the best quality and price in specific countries, regions, and networks.

What to look for

As you consider adding a second CPaaS platform to your infrastructure, you should consider two key factors: availability and support.

Availability and uptime

Any network platform can encounter unplanned outages. When that happens with a cloud communications platform, users can fail to receive important information such as account alerts, delivery notifications, and appointment reminders. Worse, they can experience issues with sign-in workflows. If someone doesn’t retrieve a text message for 2FA, they can’t access the resources they need on your systems.

Plivo promises 99.99% uptime. In practice we generally do better than that — check our status page for proof. That enables us to deliver more than a billion transactions every month. Any CPaaS provider should offer you service-level agreements (SLA) with similar uptime guarantees. If you have both a primary and a secondary CPaaS provider with those kinds of SLAs, chances are you’ll never lose touch with your customers.

Customer support

When downtime happens, as it inevitably does, you need to be able to get in touch with your provider to diagnose the issue and get it solved, whether it stems from your application, the CPaaS platform, or a carrier network. You want a partner that claims responsibility for getting you back in service, regardless of where the issue arose. You want to work with an organization that understands the unique telco laws and regulations in each country and works with carrier networks.

That’s a difficult task for some CPaaS providers that lack direct connections with carriers. Problem resolution takes a lot longer when your provider lacks visibility into the network. Other providers have limited support hours, or their support staff is unreachable unless you’re a top-tier enterprise customer.

Plivo is known for being one of the few providers that can offer technical help as needed on a per-customer basis. Customers can talk with solution engineers for guidance on complex integrations for fast issue resolution.

Plivo works directly with in-country Tier 1 carriers with direct interconnectivity to local telecom network operators in more than 100 countries. We have network engineers standing by 24/7 in network operations centers (NOC) in Austin, Texas, and Bengaluru, India, who can diagnose and solve problems quickly and get you back online.

These relationships enable our customers to make calls and send SMS messages to every country in the world without routing dilution or route blending. We offer the best possible connections worldwide, so you aren’t paying for undelivered messages.

Second to none

If you’re considering Plivo as a second CPaaS, we make it easy for you to get started. We have solution templates for several use cases, clear getting-started documentation, and flexible pay-as-you-go pricing for both SMS and Voice. (You’ll notice our rates are lower than those of most of our competitors.)

Businesses need to stay close to customers, prospects, and partners. Adding automated SMS and voice communications to their portfolio through a cloud communications platform lets businesses deliver the kinds of experiences their customers expect — and having a second platform to fall back on and spread the load lets them keep delivering even when things go wrong.

See for yourself — sign up for a free trial today.

Your company has settled on Plivo to handle its voice and messaging communications, and now it’s your job to start integrating Plivo into your company’s applications. Don’t worry — Plivo has an SDK to help you out. Let’s see how to make outbound calls and handle incoming calls through Plivo in a PHP application.

Install the Plivo SDK

We’ll presume you already have PHP and Composer installed. Change to the directory into which you want to install the Plivo PHP release and run

$ composer require plivo/plivo-php

or you can download the source from our GitHub repository, then run

$ composer install

Find your Auth ID and Auth Token

You have to have proper credentials before you can use the Plivo API. We provide an Auth ID and Auth Token in the Account section at the top of the overview page of the Plivo console.

Choose a phone number

You need an voice-enabled Plivo phone number if you want to receive incoming calls. Check the Numbers screen of your Plivo console to see what numbers you have available. You can also rent numbers from this screen.

Use PHLO to set up an outbound call

Now you can turn to PHLO, Plivo’s visual workflow design studio, to set up the workflow for an outbound call. Click on the PHLO icon on the left-side navigation bar, then on Create New PHLO. In the window that pops up, click Build My Own.

Let’s start with a very simple workflow. From the list of components on the left side, drag and drop the Initiate Call component onto the canvas, then connect the Start node to the Initiate Call node using the API Request trigger state.

Now you can add configuration information for the call in the right pane. Valid phone numbers begin with a plus sign and a country code. Add a caller ID number in the From field and a destination number in the To field, then click Validate to save the configuration.

PHLO lets you use variables for From and To values, but we’re keeping it simple for this example.

Now drag the Play Audio component onto the canvas. Connect the Initiate Call node to Play Audio using the Answered trigger state. In the Configuration panel, enter the text you want to play for the call recipient, then click Validate.

That’s all we’re going to do for now — we told you it was simple. Give the PHLO a name by clicking on the pencil icon in the upper left, then click the Save button in the upper right.

Run the PHLO to make a call

Now you can trigger the PHLO and test it out. Copy the PHLO ID from the end of the URL of the workflow you just created. You’re also going to need your Auth ID and Auth Token. Create a PHP source code file — let’s call it TriggerPhlo.php — and paste this code into it:

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<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Plivo\Resources\PHLO\PhloRestClient;
use Plivo\Exceptions\PlivoRestException;
$client = new PhloRestClient("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>");

$phlo = $client->phlo->get("<PHLO_ID>");
try {
    $response = $phlo->run();
    print_r($response);
} catch (PlivoRestException $ex) {
    print_r($ex);
}

Substitute actual values for <auth_id>, <auth_token>, and <PHLO_ID>. Save the file and run it with the command

$ php TriggerPhlo.php

Boom — you’ve made an outbound call.

Set up inbound calls

Of course outbound calls are only half of the equation. Plivo supports inbound calls as well. To see how, let’s create another PHLO and again specify Build My Own. This time, drag the Play Audio component onto the canvas and connect the Start node to it using the Incoming Call trigger state. In the Configuration panel, enter some text to speak to the caller when the call is answered, then click Validate to save the configuration. Give this PHLO a name, then click Save.

Before you can receive a call using this PHLO, you have to assign it to a Plivo number. Go back to the Plivo console and click on Phone Numbers on the left nav bar. From the list of Your Numbers, click on the number you want to use. On the next screen, from the Application Type dropdown, choose PHLO. From the PHLO Name dropdown, choose the PHLO you just created. Then click Update Number at the bottom of the screen.

Guess what? You’re done! You don’t have to run a program for this PHLO to work. Just call the Plivo number you specified and you should hear the message you configured read by Plivo’s text-to-speech processor.

Conclusion

And that’s all there is to sending and receiving voice calls using Plivo’s PHP SDK. Don’t use PHP? Don’t worry — we have SDKs for Ruby, Java, Node.js, Python, .NET Core, .NET Framework, and Go.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started takes only five minutes. Sign up today.

Successful businesses maintain reliable communication with their customers. That doesn’t necessarily mean more communication, as anyone who’s opted out of too-frequent marketing emails would agree. It means that important information from the company gets to its customers, and vice versa.

To foster reliable communications, businesses need a reliable communications platform. That’s why Plivo puts so much effort into maintaining high deliverability and reliability for its communications platform as a service (CPaaS).

It starts with our internal infrastructure. Plivo is hosted on a cloud platform with high availability built in. We guarantee 99.99% uptime.

Messages and network traffic then go out over redundant links to the carriers in our network. We connect directly with Tier 1 telecom network operators in more than 100 countries, and have direct connectivity with carriers in more than 190 countries overall. Having those direct relationships means fewer interconnections and less chance of packets being dropped or misrouted.

We have seven points of presence (PoP) strategically located near high-traffic internet exchange points (IXP) on five continents, which helps us deliver sub-50-millisecond connections to carriers to give customers the best voice call experience. We staff geographically distributed network operations centers (NOC) in Austin, Texas, and Bangalore, India, to deliver round-the-clock support from trained engineers. All of which is to say that Plivo builds in high performance along with reliability.

Thanks to our investment in our global network, we ensure that customers’ messages take the fastest, most reliable routes. By doing that we provide low latency for both SMS and voice traffic and clearer voice calls. How do we know what routes are reliable? By getting constant feedback. Plivo sets up company-owned handsets as test nodes across all the countries we serve, using real phone numbers from carriers local to each region. We send messages to these test nodes and receive data back about voice and SMS deliverability and delivery speed. If we encounter issues, we dynamically and automatically reroute traffic to better-performing carriers.

Is all that effort working? According to our customers, yes. Here’s a sample of comments they’ve left in G2 reviews:

• If you are looking for a simple and robust SMS API both for international or local use, Plivo is by far the most affordable and reliable choice. — Kaleab t
• Having tried other vendors, we found Plivo to be easy and customisable, not to mention super reliable too. — Kaushik K
• Their service is very reliable… even during events like hurricane Harvey (I live in Houston) their service was there 100% on-line for me and my clients. — Jorge Eliecer V
• If you’re looking for a reliable alternative to the likes of Twilio, look no further. It’s simple to use, reliable, with plenty of features. — Tommy N

Plivo’s voice and SMS APIs let businesses incorporate phone calls and send and receive SMS messages within their own applications. Nowadays a reliable CPaaS makes more sense than building similar functionality in-house. No business should have to buy and maintain expensive equipment, handle carrier relationships, or hire additional developers to write and maintain their communication platform software.

Reliability is one of the factors, along with a strong carrier network and consultative customer support, that make Plivo stand out among cloud communications platforms, and that we’re highlighting in this post in our Lessons in CPaaS Leadership blog series. For a CPaaS, reliability isn’t something you build into your infrastructure and then ignore. It’s a constant process of checking routes and testing deliverability, which all goes on behind the scenes out of view of users. Plivo tries to make it look easy so you can rest assured that your messages will get through, because we’re not satisfied until you connect with your customers.

First, though, connect with us. Sign up for a free trial — it takes only five minutes.

Your company has chosen Plivo to handle its voice and messaging communications. Now, it’s your job to integrate Plivo into your company’s applications. Don’t worry — you can send SMS in PHP using the PHP SDK and easily write PHP applications that send and receive SMS messages.

This guide will explain the steps for sending and receiving SMS messages in PHP. We'll cover everything from setting up your account to crafting the code snippets for sending messages and handling incoming replies. By the end, you'll be ready to leverage Plivo’s SMS API to send notifications, alerts, or even two-way interactions within your PHP applications.

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Prerequisites

Before diving into the steps in this guide, make sure you have the following prerequisites ready to go. 

• A Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. 
• Install PHP
• Install Composer
• Install Laravel and create a Laravel project
• Install the PHP Plivo SDK

Send an SMS in PHP

Now you’re ready to start. Create a file called SendSMS.php and paste into it this code.

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<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use Plivo\RestClient;

$client = new RestClient("<auth_id>","<auth_token>");
$message_created = $client->messages->create([ 
       "src" => "<sender_id>",
       "dst" => "<destination_number>",
       "text"  =>"Hello, world!",
       "url"=>"https://<yourdomain>.com/sms_status/"
    ]
);

Replace the auth placeholders with actual values from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234). In countries other than the US and Canada you can use a sender ID for the message source. You must have a Plivo phone number to send messages to the US or Canada; you can rent a Plivo number from Phone Numbers > Buy Numbers on the Plivo console or via the Numbers API. Save the file and run it.

Note: If you’re using a Plivo Trial account, you can send messages only to phone numbers that have been verified with Plivo. You can verify (sandbox) a phone number by going to the console’s Phone Numbers > Sandbox Numbers page.

Receive SMS in PHP

Of course sending messages is only half of the equation. Plivo supports receiving SMS text messages in many countries (see our SMS API coverage page and click on the countries you’re interested in). When someone sends an SMS message to a Plivo phone number, you can receive it on your server by setting a Message URL in your Plivo application. Plivo will send the message along with other parameters to your Message URL.

Create a file called receive_sms.php (or whatever name you like) and paste into it this code.

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<?php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';

$from_number = $_REQUEST["From"];
$to_number = $_REQUEST["To"];
$text = $_REQUEST["Text"];


echo("Message received - From $from_number, To: $to_number, Text: $text");

Save the file and run it.

$ php -S localhost:8000

You should then be able to see your basic server app in action at http://localhost:8000/receive_sms/.

That’s fine for testing, but it’s not much good if you can’t connect to the internet to receive incoming messages and handle callbacks. For that, we recommend using ngrok, which exposes local servers behind NATs and firewalls to the public internet over secure tunnels. Install it and run ngrok on the command line, specifying the port that hosts the application on which you want to receive messages.

$ ./ngrok http [portnum]

Ngrok will display a forwarding link that you can use as a webhook to access your local server using the public network.

Now you can create an application to receive SMS messages (follow our Quickstart guide for details).

Best practices for sending SMS with PHP

Make sure your SMS messages are received and read by following these best practices. 

1. Send using a valid phone number

Use a phone number that is registered with your gateway provider or a valid number associated with your account.

2. Use E.164 formatting

E.164 is an international standard numbering format developed for telephone systems worldwide. Numbers are a maximum of 15 digits starting with a plus sign (+) followed by the country code (e.g. 1 for the U.S.) and the mobile number.

3. Keep messages concise

Stick to around 160 characters to stay within GSM-7 encoding limits. 

4. Provide an opt-out option

The Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association’s (CTIA) guidelines require brands to give their audience a way to opt-out of receiving future text messages (such as, “reply STOP to stop receiving these messages”). 

To learn more about sending SMS with PHP, check out our developer documentation.

Get started with Plivo to send SMS in PHP

And that’s all there is to sending and receiving SMS messages using Plivo’s PHP SDK. Don’t use PHP? Don’t worry — we have SDKs for Java, Python, Node.js, Ruby, .NET Core, .NET Framework, and Go.

Haven’t tried Plivo yet? Getting started is easy and takes only five minutes. Sign up today.

With Plivo’s Voice API platform, you can programmatically make, receive, and control calls across the world by integrating voice calling within your applications using only a few lines of code.

However, calls sometimes fail, often as a result of intermittent network issues, and we want to give our customers the flexibility to decide what happens when those errors occur. Maybe you want longer timeouts to better support intermittent network issues between Plivo and your server or application. Or maybe you want to enable HTTP callback connection retries on any failures and timeouts. Or maybe you want to pair those retries with shorter connection timeouts to ensure faster failover to your fallback URL for a better user experience.

With our latest release, the choice is yours. Plivo’s new configurable callback retries feature for our Voice API lets you override our default connection settings to fit your needs and give our Voice customers the ultimate flexibility and control.

How it worksPlivo makes HTTP posts to webhooks as callbacks during different states of a call and to many URLs, such as answer_url, fallback_url, hangup_url, action, and callback_url. Webhooks act as an extension of an API, but instead of your code requesting data from our API platform, Plivo sends the data directly to you.

Whenever a webhook request fails due to some destination server issue, you can configure HTTP callback connection overrides on a per-webhook URL basis. To set a nondefault callback retry configuration for any given URL, you can append configuration parameters to the URL in the form of extensions (also known as fragments) as key-value pairs with the following syntax:

the first key-value pair should start with #key and value should be separated by =the key-value pairs should be separated by &The result might look like https://example.com/answer_url?query=123#ct=2000&rt=3000.

For a full breakdown of the timeouts available for the webhook URLs and their respective allowed values and default values, as well as how to configure the number of retries, see our product documentation.

If you already use Plivo’s Voice API and are familiar with HTTP callbacks, we encourage you to start using these new parameters in your applications. They add great flexibility to Plivo’s webhook callback requests.

Haven’t built a Plivo voice application before? No problem; we have Getting Started guides that can help you start adding voice capabilities to your applicat.

Your company has settled on Plivo to handle its voice and messaging communications, and now it’s your job to start integrating Plivo into your company’s applications. Don’t worry — Plivo has an SDK to help you out. Let’s see how to make outbound calls and handle incoming calls through Plivo's vOice API in a Ruby application.

Install the Plivo SDK

We’ll presume you already have Ruby installed. Change to the directory into which you want to install the Plivo Ruby gem and run

$ gem install plivo

or you can follow the instructions in our Quickstart guide.

Find your Auth ID and Auth Token

You have to have proper credentials before you can use the Plivo API. We provide an Auth ID and Auth Token in the Account section at the top of the overview page of the Plivo console.

Choose a phone number

You need an voice-enabled Plivo phone number if you want to receive incoming calls. Check the Numbers screen of the Plivo console to see what numbers you have available. You can also rent numbers from this screen.

Use PHLO to set up an outbound call

Now you can turn to PHLO, Plivo’s visual workflow design studio, to set up the workflow for an outbound call. Click on the PHLO icon on the left navigation bar, then on Create New PHLO. In the window that pops up, click Build My Own.

Let’s start with a simple workflow. From the list of components on the left side, drag and drop the Initiate Call component onto the canvas, then connect the Start node to the Initiate Call node using the API Request trigger state.

Now you can add configuration information for the call in the right pane. Valid phone numbers begin with a plus sign and a country code. Add a caller ID number in the From field and a destination number in the To field, then click Validate to save the configuration.

PHLO lets you use variables for From and To values, but we’re keeping it simple for this example.

Now drag the Play Audio component onto the canvas. Connect the Initiate Call node to Play Audio using the Answered trigger state. In the Configuration panel, enter the text you want to play for the call recipient, then click Validate.

That’s all we’re going to do for now — we told you it was simple. Give the PHLO a name by clicking on the pencil icon in the upper left, then click the Save button in the upper right.

Run the PHLO to make a call

Now you can trigger the PHLO and test it out. Copy the PHLO ID from the end of the URL of the workflow you just created. You’re also going to need your Auth ID and Auth Token. Create a Ruby source code file — let’s call it trigger_phlo.rb — and paste this code into it:

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require 'rubygems'
require 'plivo'

include Plivo

client = Phlo.new("<auth_id>", "<auth_token>")

\# if credentials are stored in the   PLIVO_AUTH_ID and the PLIVO_AUTH_TOKEN environment variables
\# then initialize client as:
\# client = Phlo.new

begin
  phlo = client.phlo.get('<phlo_id>')
  response = phlo.run()
  puts response
rescue PlivoRESTError => e
  puts 'Exception: ' + e.message
end

Substitute actual values for <auth_id>, <auth_token>, and <PHLO_ID>. Save the file and run it with the command

$ ruby trigger_phlo.rb

Boom — you’ve made an outbound call.

Set up inbound calls

Of course outbound calls are only half of the equation. Plivo supports inbound calls as well. To see how, let’s create another PHLO and again specify Build My Own. This time, drag the Play Audio component onto the canvas and connect the Start node to it using the Incoming Call trigger state. In the Configuration panel, enter some text to speak to the caller when the call is answered, then click Validate to save the configuration. Give this PHLO a name, then click Save.

Before you can receive a call using this PHLO, you have to assign it to a Plivo number. Go back to the Plivo console and click on Phone Numbers on the left nav bar. From the list of Your Numbers, click on the number you want to use. On the next screen, from the Application Type dropdown, choose PHLO. From the PHLO Name dropdown, choose the PHLO you just created. Then click Update Number at the bottom of the screen.

Guess what? You’re done! You don’t have to run a program for this PHLO to work. Just call the Plivo number you specified and you should hear the message you configured read by Plivo’s text-to-speech processor.

Conclusion

And that’s all there is to sending and receiving voice calls using Plivo’s Ruby SDK. Don’t use Ruby? Don’t worry — we have SDKs for PHP, Java, Node.js, Python, .NET Core, .NET Framework, and Go.

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