Automation Action: Twilio Make A Telephone Call

This action enables you to call any telephone number. Once answered, ThinkAutomation can speak custom text to the receiver and/or connect the call to another number.

Makes an outbound voice call using the Twilio API. Twilio is a cloud-based telephony provider.

See: https://www.twilio.com for more information.

Before using this action you need to create a Twilio Account. Once you have created an account, login and select Dashboard. Select Show API Credentials - this will display the Account SID and Account Token. Enter these into ThinkAutomation Server Settings - Twilio Tab.

You must specify the From Twilio Number. This is the phone number that will be displayed on the receivers phone. In your Twilio Account you can create a new phone number, or you can verify one of your existing phone numbers with Twilio. Once verified it can be used as the From Number.

Enter the phone number to call in the Call Number entry. This must be the full international number. You can use the Normalize Phone Number action to correctly format a phone number for a given country.

Select the Ring For (Seconds). This defaults to 30 seconds. If the call is not answered within this time the call will be closed.

On Call Answer

Once the receiver has answered the call you can choose to:

Say Text

This will read the specified text to the receiver. You can specify up to 4096 characters. The text can include %variable% replacements.

Say In Voice/Language

The Say In Voice option allows you to select a voice (Woman, Man or Alice). The Say In Language can be used to select the language for the text being read. The Woman/Man voice can use languages: English US, English UK, French, German, Spanish or Italian. The Alice voice has a choice for more languages.

Play Audio File URL

You can also have an audio file played to the receiver. Specify the URL to the audio file to be played.

Hang Up If Machine Answers

Enable this option if the call should be stopped if an answering machine or voice mail system picks up the call.

Record Call

Enable this option if you want the call to be recorded. The URL of the recording can be returned to a ThinkAutomation field or variable on completion of the call.

Connect Call To

Enable this option if you want the call to be connected to another number once it has been answered and the Say Text/Play Audio has completed (if any). Specify the Connect To Number. This other number will then be called and the two calls connected. If you do not use the call connect then the call will end once the Say Text/Play Audio has completed.

On Call Completion

Once the call has ended the Call Duration, Call Status and Recording URL can be returned to ThinkAutomation variables.

The Call Status will be one of: completed, busy, failed or no-answer

Automation Processing

When ThinkAutomation starts the call the message processing for the current message will pause until the call completes (or fails). Other messages will be processed whilst the call is active. Once the call is complete the remaining actions in the Automation will execute.

Phone Number Formats

All phone numbers must include the country code preceded by + so 800 680 7712 would be +18006807712. For UK numbers the first 0 of the number is omitted. For example 01782 822577 would be +441782822577. ThinkAutomation will remove any spaces and add the + sign itself if required. Use the Normalize Phone Number Action to correctly format a phone number.