Transcript

Welcome back to another episode of stupid geek tricks with your host Eli the computer guy O did you know Twilio has their own markup language twiddle. I don't know it's Twi ML. How do you say that? I just don't know. But anyways, in fact, Twilio has their own markup language, which is pretty cool. And this is also one of the things to be thinking about with the idea of stacks in the modern world like. So many times people ask, you know, what language do I need to learn in order to get a job or whatever else. And you know, there's that whole note or Python or C or whatever, learn Linux or Windows or whatnot. And it is important to understand with a lot of these infrastructure as a service, a systems or software as a service systems, they themselves are actually pretty darn complicated. So depending on what you're trying to do, a learning, a learning is something like Twilio itself might be its own. Skill set, it's literally got its own language, but anyways, anyways, uh, what I did today, I think this is pretty cool is I created a little outbound calling system using Twilio. So this is a Python script. This is reliable residing locally on this MacBook Pro and what this is going to do is going to go out and it's going to communicate with Twilio in order to be able to send a call to my little free. Telephone number here. So if you want to play around with these telephone systems, a Google Voice will actually give you a free telephone number. For some reason, the modern world, the kid, the kids, the kids literally like, I know, I know I'm not supposed to give kids crap anymore, but come on now you have so much at your disposable that is free. I literally, I was like crap. I need a free telephone number because I don't want to show you folks my, my, my phone number all the time. How do I do that? And I just Google search I was like free telephone number and then Google Voice came U and then Google Voice literally just gave me a free telephone number so I can make calls from this thing. I can get calls from this thing. I'm just saying kids, kids like yes, yes, I'm look how you might not be able to afford a house. You might not be able to afford medical care, but but. There are better, there are benefits to the modern world. Anyways, so basically this is my little telephone thing here, so I can use this. This is just just like completely like a normal telephone. I've got an actual telephone number up here. So we go we take a look at our script. I'm using environment variables now because these actually have keys and tokens. I don't want you to see that was one thing with Twilio or rotating, rotating your your API keys is a bit of a pain in the ****. So anyways, I don't want you to show you don't want to show you that there. So basically this up here, this is just for the API keys and then this is for Twilio itself. So I have a env file U there EMV file. It's going to pull in the values from the dot env file and that's see this OS dot git environment and then it will set it to these variable values. And then this is where you actually connect with Twilio. So client equals client account ID auth token blase blase. Then we have the two phone number. So this is the number we're going to be calling to the from phone number. So this is Twilio's number. Also, I again, I'm using free service for this, so it doesn't cost me anything to play around with this. And then we go come down here and we look at our little function for for the call, right? So call equals. This is all basically copy paste. This is what you're going to change in here, right? SO20ML. So this is the Twilio markup language. So response response is basically what the response is going to be and then say So the say tag, whenever you see the say tag, that is what The thing is actually going to say. And then we're going to pause for two seconds. Play something else and the pause for two seconds it is weird with us like literally if you don't put a pause in here as soon like and I mean as soon as it finishes saying anything it disconnects the phone so that could be a little disconcerting so that's why I put this extra pause in here so say hello world this is the Twilio bot calling wait 2 seconds that was fun goodbye wait 2 seconds and then cut 2 the two phone number from the from phone number. So basically when we run this just so you know when I pick up the call, it's going to have this little free twilio message because. And I am using a free Twilio service, so I'll have that. But then when I press a number, it will go through the script. And so when we go through the script, that's what the normal call would be like, oh, let's do this. I'm going to hit the play. I'm going to call in. Wow. Trial accounts, you can remove this message. See that's the whole trial account thing Account. So this is the normal message world. This is the Twilio bot calling. Yeah, it was fun. Goodbye. See look at that so that was that was all basically I have this my low Python script here. It sent this U to Twilio Twilio then sent the phone call to this phone service was able to pick it up and then it read through that nice little message there and again, remember with this kind of thing, you can do F strings. So see with this, this is just a string here, so you can do an F string. So you could have this information coming in the say these could be this could be variable values like say your. Your car has been fixed. We are open until 6:00 tonight. Or say we've run into a problem with fixing your computer, blah, blah, blah. Could you please call us back at this particular phone number? So the cool part about this too is basically with F strings, you could dynamically populate this variable value to be customized for whatever it is that your particular app would need. And so as I've said before, this is the really cool thing with the modern world of technology. Is that so many of these different services can really be pulled together and to create a very robust platform I mean shockingly easily I mean look at this it's 20 it's 27 lines of code theoretically and there's a lot of frankly a lot of this is crap code so probably probably about 20 lines of actual code literally gets you this and it doesn't cost very much the cool part about this is this is all going through Twilio so Twilio does charge you some money for this but. It's not, it's not horrible. It's like a phone number. I'm probably going to buy a phone number just to make my life easier. A phone number is like $1.50 a month. For a phone number, it's $1.50 a month. Plus they have some other fees on top of that. It's just, it's just so incredibly inexpensive. So imagine being able to add a telephone component to whatever you're doing. I don't know. I think it seems, I think it seems pretty cool. So yeah, anywho, this is the type of thing we are going to be teaching at Silicon Dojo on February. 11th, we're going to be having a class on Twilio and 11 labs for artificial intelligence agents for telephony. I don't know whatever the hell I'm naming that class. Anyways, you can go take a look at silicondojo.com if you're interested in that. This is the type of project we're going to do. See you later.