Recommended services for sending SMS and processing the responses?
I'm interested in a service (or combination of services) that could do something like:
-
Integrate with my API (or Zapier) to grab a name and phone number that I provide
-
Send this phone number a text message (SMS) with a question, such as, "On a scale of 1 to 5, how are you feeling?"
-
When the person answers with something like, "Today I'm a 4", then it takes the "4" and sends it back to my API/Zapier to be saved to my database. Or even if it can't handle the "4" on its own, at least send the full response to my API/Zapier.
Any recommendations? I've tried searching for various chatbots, but haven't found anything that fits the need yet.
This service is by far the cheapest in the space if price matters to you at scale: https://www.plivo.com/ ...easy enough API to figure out too.
I'll second this, I've used Plivo and they are both inexpensive and pretty easy to setup. Basically the same as Twilio but about half the price last time I checked.
Thanks! I'll be sure to check out Plivo too.
You can try Twilio if you're looking for something more low level to the API where you can do all sorts of things with the response.
Not an off the shelf solution, but you can build this using Twilio
Zapier has integration for Twilio
https://zapier.com/apps/twilio/integrations
Yeah, I guess Twilio would be the most straightforward option. I was thinking that I needed to have some kind of chatbot functionality, but if all I'm really after is asking some questions and getting some answers, then maybe I could handle that myself and just use Twilio to do the text message handling.