John Wolthuis's dashboard

John Wolthuis replied on November 24, 2009 23:29 to the question "ring tone instead of a hold sound while waitng for http resposne" in Twilio:

Hi Oleg,
There isn't currently a way to customize the "working" sound, but it shouldn't kick in for several seconds. Can you send me a call example and I'll investigate whats going on.

-john

John Wolthuis replied on November 24, 2009 21:04 to the question "Is the record attribute available on conference calls?" in Twilio:

Hi David.
The <Dial record="true" action="/handle"> functionality works on a conference as well as dialing a phone number. When that participant leaves, Twilio will post to the dial action url with a RecordingUrl.

Normal caveats about dial record being an undocumented beta feature that is subject to change still apply :)

John Wolthuis replied on November 19, 2009 19:28 to the question "200 numbers with same content" in Twilio:

Hi Eshwar,
Currently, we do not have an interface for submitting multiple outgoing calls in a single REST request.

If you are sending out the same message to each phone number, you might look at our Simple Message Twimlet. http://labs.twilio.com/twimlets/message

This lets you create a stateless URL for playing the message that is served up by us, rather than having to host the TwiML on your own server.

-john

John Wolthuis replied on November 18, 2009 08:44 to the question "first party to hang up on a connected call" in Twilio:

Hi Oleg,
You can infer which side hung up the call during a Dial by looking at the CallStatus that is passed to your Dial action url. When the main leg, the leg that initiated the Dial, hangs up, it ends both sides of the conversation and CallStatus=completed is submitted to the action url. If the second leg hangs up first, this does not end the main leg's call. Instead Dial submits to its action URL with a CallStatus=in-progress and continues to execute the TwiML that you respond with.

Let me know if this makes sense.

-john

John Wolthuis replied on November 16, 2009 02:46 to the question "Does the Sandbox limit DIAL calls to 10 mins?" in Twilio:

Hi dxjones,
A 10 minute limit on calls was recently added to the sandbox. I apologize that this change was not reflected in the documentation. We'll update the docs asap.

Cheers,
-john

John Wolthuis replied on November 13, 2009 18:01 to the question "Limiting incoming calls?" in Twilio:

Hi Michael,
Right now, there is no way to block or reject an incoming call to your app. You can keep track of how many in-progress calls you have and return a <response><hangup></hangup></response> to new calls if you don't want to accept any more, but we will still answer those calls at this time. We are looking into a better solution for this for future api releases.

Thanks,
-john

John Wolthuis replied on November 12, 2009 03:07 to the question "Dial verb returns "no-answer" when called party greets with "Hello, XXX speaking"" in Twilio:

Hi Kevin,
We do not do answering machine detection on outgoing calls made by Dial, so you may be bumping up against a different problem. I'd need to look closer at your use case and some call examples to try and figure out what is happening.

Feel free to drop me a note at help@twilio.com and we can figure this out.

-john

John Wolthuis replied on November 11, 2009 20:09 to the problem "Errors when asking for local phone number." in Twilio:

Hi zengeneral,
We have a REST api for provisioning numbers as well as the web portal, so this is something that you should be able to automate easily.

Can you give me more information on the errors you are seeing? Is it just out of stock notices, or is it something different?

Thanks,
-john

John Wolthuis set one of John Wolthuis' replies as an official response to "How to JAR files" in Twilio

John Wolthuis replied on November 10, 2009 19:58 to the question "How to JAR files" in Twilio:

nbdab,
We have included an ant build.xml file in the helper library source with a target for building a jar file. You will need to have the Apache Ant application installed to use it. http://ant.apache.org/

Once you do, go to the root directory of the Twilio java library and type:

ant jar

this will create a file called twiliorest.jar

-john

John Wolthuis replied on October 29, 2009 05:17 to the problem "Hang Ups about Hang Ups" in Twilio:

Cell phones and analog phones are different. When the call is done on a cellphone, it shuts down the radio connection and puts the cellphone in a mode to receive new calls automatically. For regular analog land line phones, they are actually holding the circuit open when off the hook, preventing new calls from coming in. I don't think there is any way to reset that line without hanging up.

-john

John Wolthuis replied on October 29, 2009 05:02 to the problem "Hang Ups about Hang Ups" in Twilio:

I am assuming you are just hearing the default " *RING* If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try again" error. Is that correct?

As far as I know, the only way to avoid it is to hang up the phone when the call is over. What is the behavior you are looking for in this case?

-john

John Wolthuis replied on October 29, 2009 04:46 to the problem "Hang Ups about Hang Ups" in Twilio:

By home phone, do you mean wired landline?

I believe in most cases, if you are on a landline and the remote party hangs up, you hear an error after a few seconds telling you that you left your phone off the hook.

Let me know if I'm misunderstanding the question.

-john

John Wolthuis replied on October 27, 2009 20:25 to the question "Callback on Hangup" in Twilio:

Hi Joaquin,
Can you email me the callSid of the call attempt to help@twilio.com and I will investigate.

-john

John Wolthuis replied on October 27, 2009 19:33 to the question "Callback missing CallStatus="completed" parameter" in Twilio:

Hi Ryan,
That should not be the case. Can you email me at help@twilio.com and we can try and debug whats going on for your case.

Thanks,
-john

John Wolthuis replied on October 27, 2009 19:28 to the question "Callback on Hangup" in Twilio:

Hi Joaquin,
When you say you dont receive a call back, do you mean you dont receive the HTTP request back, or you dont receive the phonecall?

-john

John Wolthuis replied on October 26, 2009 18:43 to the question "Callback on Hangup" in Twilio:

Hi Joaquin,
The call end callback should also include the CallSid, so that you can use that to match up status with call completion in your records.

Another note: busy, failed, and no-answer calls only generate one request to your webserver.

For a busy call, you would receive one request with the following parameters:

DialStatus=busy
CallStatus=completed
CallSid=CA0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef

For an answered call, you would receive a minimum of two requests
The first would have the paramters:

DialStatus=answered
CallStatus=in-progress
CallSid=CA0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef

And the last, the call end callback, would have these parameters:

CallStatus=completed
CallSid=CA0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef

What I would recomend is, watch for DialStatus on the first request your webserver receives. If it is anything but answered, update your records to show the call was busy/not answered/failed. If DialStatus=answered, then you know the call was answered. Add logic to watch for requests with CallStatus=completed, which indicates that the answered call has completed.

John Wolthuis replied on October 26, 2009 04:54 to the discussion "OutgoingCallerIds Resource" in Twilio:

Hi jdavid,
Take a look at the IncomingPhoneNumbers resource.

http://www.twilio.com/docs/api/2008-0...

This gives you a list of the numbers you purchased from Twilio, as well as gives you an API for provisioning new local and toll free numbers.

-john

John Wolthuis replied on October 23, 2009 21:22 to the question "Callback on Hangup" in Twilio:

Sorry that we missed the earlier question. I believe there is confusion on the difference between DialStatus and CallStatus.

CallStatus is sent on every request from Twilio, and describes whether the call is "in-progress" or "completed". If you see a request with a CallStatus=completed, you know the call has just ended. We always make one final request to your initial URL when the call completes. This is known as the call-end-callback.

DialStatus is sent only on the initial request by Twilio or the Dial action request. It is intended to describe the results of an attempt to connect to a party. It can have a number of values, including completed, busy, failed, no-answer, etc. If you make an outgoing api call to a number that is busy, Twilio will submit DialStatus=busy to your application.

Let me know if this clears things up. This is a somewhat confusing topic.

-john

John Wolthuis replied on October 12, 2009 20:16 to the problem "Sandbox test over skype" in Twilio:

Glad its working for you. Let us know if you have any other questions.

-john