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A few years ago everyone in the office was sick of answering the phone just to buzz people into the building. So I rigged the downstairs call-box to call a Twi
by MalcolmDiggs 11y ago
A few years ago everyone in the office was sick of answering the phone just to buzz people into the building.
So I rigged the downstairs call-box to call a Twilio number instead of ringing the office line. The Twilio bot would then prompt the user to enter a passcode, and would then buzz them into the building if the passcode they entered was correct.
This allowed us to give guests temporary passcodes to get into the building, and allowed us to track who was coming and going (because we gave every employee a unique code to use as well). Worked pretty well, and total setup time was just a couple hours.
- mod 11y agoHow did the user interact with the Twilio number at the door? Did you have some kind of device the bot ran on?
- MalcolmDiggs 11y agoLet's see if I can explain in a way that makes sense... The person at the door has a keypad and an intercom (for talking or hearing prompts). The intercom box calls the Twilio number and patches it live to the user at the door. This way anything the user presses on the keypad is received by the Twilio number. Twilio, on their end, relays the input that they're receiving from the user by POSTing payloads to a bot running on one of our cloud servers (just a regular little AWS server). Our bot responds to Twilio's POSTSs with TwiML commands (Twilio's version of XML), which tells Twilio how to respond to the user at the door. Twilio gets our instructions, and responds accordingly. In order to buzz someone into the door, Twilio just needs to emit a certain DTMF tone, and the callbox would unlock the door automatically. Hope that all made sense.
- mod 11y agoVery cool! Thanks for the explanation.