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Twilio channel

See the Channel Catalog to see which Plans have access to this channel.

As a developer, you can use Twilio to make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and perform other communication functions using web service APIs.

How to Connect

  1. On the My pipelines page, select Create Pipeline.
  2. Search for or select a step, and then select it to add it to the pipeline.
    When you add a step to a pipeline, it is added to the canvas of the pipeline designer.
  3.  Expand the Connection section of the step, and add the required information.

For more information about connections, see How to connect to a channel.

Connect to Twilio

  1. Expand Twilio and click Connect to Twilio You will be asked to enter your Account SID and Auth Token.
  2. From your Twilio profile, click on Settings → General. The API Credentials dialog displays:
  3. Enter your LIVE Credentials to connect with the Twilio Channel.

How to reconnect

You may need to reconnect your account to a channel. Reasons may be (but not limited to):

  • If you need to connect a different account.
  • Authorization updates, such as a changed password.
  • Editing the access rights that Pipelines has to the channel.

To reconnect:

  1. Select a pipeline that already has this channel in it.
  2. Open a step that contains this channel.
  3. Under account, select Connect (or reconnect) and follow the process above, How to connect.

Steps

The steps you can use with Twilio are: Messages.

Note: You cannot use jinja expressions in trigger conditions unless explicitly specified as possible.

Type Name Description
Messages
Action Send Message Sends a message to number. To send a message, these:

Account - your account in Twilio.
To number - the number of the receiver.
From number - a number you registered with Twilio. Select it from the drop-down menu.
Body - the content of the message you want to send. The message can be up to 1600 characters long.
Action Delete a Message Log Deletes a message log from your account. Once the log is deleted, it will no longer appear in the API and Account Portal logs.
Action

Fetch a linked message

 Fetches a linked message.
Action Look Up a Message Log Returns a single message log specified by the provided Message ID.
Query Search Message Logs Lists all message logs associated with your account that match certain criteria.
Trigger Message Received

Triggers when a Message is received on a specific Phone Number associated with your account.

To use this trigger specify:

Account - your account in Twilio.
Phone Number - your phone number

Limits

There are limits to how quickly messages can be sent to wireless carrier networks. This guide explains how Twilio processes your message requests, and limitations for each phone number type: Understanding Twilio Rate Limits and Message Queues

Notice: You can send messages to Twilio at a rapid rate, as long as the requests do not max out Twilio's REST API concurrency limit. When this concurrency limit is reached, Twilio will begin responding to your requests with HTTP 429, or Error code 20429. For more information, see Twilio API response Error 429 "Too Many Requests". This is a temporary issue and Pipelines will automatically resend the message.

  • API request queuing - When Twilio receives message requests from your application, these requests are queued for delivery in the order we receive them. Each of your Twilio phone numbers has a separate queue, and each queue can hold up to 4 hours' worth of message segments based on the sending rate for a phone number type. For example, a local phone number from the US or Canada has a full queue of 14,400 message segments.
  • Twilio message request processing - The rate at which Twilio dequeues messages varies depending on the origination and destination in the message requests. The following is a quick summary of the default dequeue rate:

    For example, consider the first row above when you are sending messages from a Twilio number from your project to a list of US recipients. We will process your requests and send them to the carrier networks for delivery at the rate of 1 message segment per second per Twilio phone number. This means that if you send Twilio 90 messages at the same time from the same Twilio number, it will take roughly 90 seconds for the last message to be delivered. For time-sensitive messages, we recommend that you keep a close eye on the queue length and use additional Twilio numbers for sending when needed. Twilio highly recommends using Messaging Services with Copilot to help manage multiple phone numbers.
  • Inbound messages - Inbound messages are queued at 500 messages per second for each Twilio destination. Twilio will make an HTTP request to the request URL for each message received at your number. Therefore, please make sure your server is capable of handling the load if you are expecting a large amount of concurrent inbound traffic.

Examples of usage

This example shows how you can use the Twilio channel to receive a message when you have urgent events on a certain day:

  1. First we create Search Events Query from Google Calendar channel for the exact day.

  2. Then we add condition to send SMS only if there are urgent events on this day.
  3. We choose from which account we want to send SMS, to whom and from which number.
  4. The final step is to schedule in what time should the pipe be executed:

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