The reason mobile web and native apps are superior to SMS and IVRs for the purposes of providing an interface to an application comes down to cost and difficulty.

For anything other than the most basic data entry both SMS and IVR are either tragically error prone or long winded and unwieldy.

Also, taking your example of the situation in Africa, what I found when I was in Ghana was that people would very rarely use credit at all.

In fact, they bought credit in increments under 1 dollar using mobile credit transfer stations.

The process of having to send a TXT in order to interface with an application, and then have to re-send if you make a mistake or the application requires more information, would be far too expensive (these days anyway, I guess in 10 years it may be different).

Same goes for calls into IVR systems. My friends while I was staying there would “flash” me (what we in Australia would call “pranking” – ie. calling someone so they see your name and then hanging up before they can answer) rather than call me.

Even if you remove cost from the equation (such as the “infinite SMS” plans we’re seeing in Australia right now) once you get to the point of having to have 2 or 3 SMS responses requesting a reply or more information (which is required to get data with the kind of structure that you’d expect from a 4 or 5 field web form) people start to get pretty frustrated (in my experience anyway).

That’s not to say that there aren’t some cool and wonderful things you can do by providing an SMS or IVR interface to an application, but neither of these things are unique to Twilio (indeed it’s not particularly hard to configure asterisk and setup IVR scripts with recorded messages etc., nor is it particularly hard to setup something like Kannel which provides a solid SMPP interface to almost any mobile/SMS aggregator).

I’m sure that Twilio lowers the barrier to entry for creating IVR and SMS interfaces which is great, but I think you’re overstating the opportunities somewhat.

SMS and IVR have been around for many years with popular free/open source implementations and what I’ve found in my time of trying to build apps on top of inbound SMS interaction particularly, is that it’s very hard to scale to commands that are even marginally beyond the trivial (ie. “Reply Y to confirm your booking for 9:30am this evening” is fine, but “TXT your name, followed by suburb, state, email address and reason why you should win in 25 words or less is considerably more prone to errors).

Thanks

What is the 4chan rule? You said you’d talk about it, but unless I missed it, I don’t think it was in the presentation.

Gems in Rails are typically managed in either environment.rb (for Rails 2.3.x) or Gemfile (in Rails 3.x using Bundler). I might suggest using an initializer which sets up your client with the appropriate credentials and then exposes the client object to your code as either a) a global variable or b) a singleton returned by a convenience factory class, if you’ve got a pathological dislike for globals.

If this sounds really confusing, I suggest getting a book on Ruby/Rails, as it isn’t really a Twilio problem.

Try Adhearsion with Tropo. It will be easier to scale things down the road and move to more robust platforms. Adhearsion is also a Ruby framework, so it works out of the box.

I just got done reading your blog post “Productizing Twilio Applications” and I thought I should reach out to you. I am currently in development of a web app that is going to utilize the Twilio services. I have a brief experience with the Twilio API but that was using PHP, but I am using Rails with my new web app. Basically after reading the Twilio docs, I just cant seem to figure out how to use Twilio with Rails. I am sure there is something that I am not doing or doing incorrectly but I just can’t figure it out and need some help and that’s why I am emailing you. It seems like you are using Rails in your app with Twilio, how did you get it to work?

My app just needs sms integration and I don’t have a need for the voice part of Twilio. The problem is that most instruction out on the internet for Twilio is based on voice or is really quite bad. So far I have tried using the Twilio-ruby gem and the Sms-rb gem on Rails 3.1.3. In order to stay with the Rails convention, I am trying to set up a controller to handle all the sms receiving and then a method in that controller would use Twilio to set up a view that is in XML. Is this the proper way to set it up? The sms url in my Twilio account would just be appname.com/controller/method right? I saw that in your blog you had a model class, is that necessary? I am sorry if this is hard to understand, I can send some code if you would like to take a look at it.

One last problem I have been having with it is where to put the require ‘twilio-ruby’ or equivalent call. I tried placing it before the controller class call and after, and both times I get could not find “twilio-ruby” file. I know that I have included the gem correctly but I just cant seem to get this to work. And if I remove the require call, I get an error saying Twilio is an undeclared constant.

If you could provide any insight to these problems or point me in the right direction I would appreciate it. Thank you so much for any help you can provide!

Alex