Integrating twilio for two way SMS messaging

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
1

Hey guys, im just looking for some advice and a push in the right direction with this.

I currently use twilio to send notifications to clients about appointments, but, I currently have inbound messages to twilio switched off because I don’t monitor the twilio console and I get charged for replies. If I was to turn this on inbound SMS in the twilio console I would like to have SMS messages pushed to the app so that clinicians can see these messages and ultimately reply to them.

My knowledge of webhooks, APIs and the Google/Twilio console is very limited, but I am currently investing time to research. I have found methods to log inbound SMS to google sheets, and to send SMS from google sheets. This to me sounds like an approach I should take.

I came across workflow @LeventK wrote back in 2019

1.)** You can create a standalone Google Apps Script project with doPost(e)
2.) Construct the proper Google Apps Script code to make a HTTP POST call to Twilio API
3.) Deploy the project as a web-app executable
4.) Create a Webhook Workflow within AppSheet and use the aforementioned webapp’s URL as a webhook endpoint and construct a valid JSON body for your process

Is this the approach i should be doing or have things changed since then?

Sorry about the really long message.
Ben

2

You can still send webhooks from Appsheet to a web-deployed GAS.

Writing a GAS to poll Twilio’s API is probably the route I would take if I wanted to get Twilio text responses back into a Gsheet.

You might also check out zapier or integromat to see if they have any Twilio to GSheet integrations.

4 Likes
3

Not sure if you are open for using another app, but you can use Sociocs (https://www.sociocs.com) as the front-end for incoming Twilio messages.

4

SMSala SMS API
http://www.smsala.com/sms/api

SMSala REST Message
http://api.smsala.com/index.php?title=REST_Message#Configuring_a_REST_Message

I would greatly appreciate if anyone could let me know how they got this working.

Please contact me if you are struggling with this.

Although it appears to be a straightforward integration, there seems to be a disconnect with the content type: headers. Would you be interested in collaborating with me? The REST message appears to be configured correctly, but I have found other back-end processing issues.