Description
Smartphones are now so important to us that they have become almost extensions of ourselves. If you lose your phone today, you are in trouble. Everything from emails, calendar, messaging, banking, and even our wallets are now linked to our phones. In today’s vibrant, dynamic, and ever-connected society, having access to vast amounts of information at our fingertips can be a blessing, but it can also be a curse. Busy professionals nowadays must deal with hundreds of emails on a daily or weekly basis, not to mention the many messages and notifications from social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn. Keeping up with all these messages can be overwhelming.
But what if phones could actually help us alleviate some of this information overload by notifying us of important things or allowing us to perform customized actions based on Short Message Service (SMS) or voice commands? Imagine if we could automate certain processes through messaging or voice. That would be great!
Most SMS and voice-enabled solutions are platform-specific and cannot be customized. However, one platform was designed from the ground up with developers in mind and allows anyone with coding skills to create custom messaging and voice-enabled solutions. This platform is Twilio.
Twilio is a messaging, voice, video, and authentication API for every application. It has helper libraries and SDKs in many different programming languages that help developers create apps that can leverage the power of voice and messaging.
These services are accessed over HTTP(S) through a RESTful API or through helper libraries. Its services are billed based on usage, and the platform is based on Amazon Web Services for hosting Twilio’s telephony infrastructure and providing connectivity between HTTP and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) through its APIs.
Twilio has recently extended its API support to Facebook Messenger, which coincides with the social networking company’s introduction of support for bots on its Messenger platform.
In this e-book, we will focus on how to use the C# helper library in order to build connected voice and messaging apps that leverage the power of the Twilio platform. The examples in this e-book require some knowledge of C#, however they are otherwise easy to follow and understand. We’ll be using some aspects of the most recent C# language features available. The code samples have all been written using Visual Studio 2015.
By the end of this e-book, you should feel comfortable enough to use the Twilio C# helper library in order to write voice and messaging apps with Visual Studio 2015. We’ll explore some common-use cases for voice and messaging apps that are helpful for business automation processes and could prove to be an invaluable resource for any company.