ExTwiml

March 11, 2015
elixir twilio

At LeadSimple, we use Twilio to handle phone call routing. Twilio interacts with regular HTTP endpoints on your server to control calls and SMS messages, through a form of XML they call TwiML.

I’ve been toying recently ideas on how to bring next-generation Erlang (Elixir) and next-generation telephony (Twilio) together. Toward that end, I made a little library this week to make generating TwiML from Elixir easy.

It looks like this:

defmodule YourModule do
  import ExTwiml

  def render do
    twiml do
      play "/assets/welcome.mp3"
      gather digits: 4, finish_on_key: "#" do
        say """
        Please enter the last four digits of your credit card number, followed
        by the pound sign.
        """, voice: "woman"
      end
    end
  end
end

Calling YourModule.render will return the following XML as a string:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
  <Play>/assets/welcome.mp3</Play>
  <Gather digits="4" finishOnKey="#">
    <Say voice="woman">
      Please enter the last four digits of your credit card number, followed by
      the pound sign.
    </Say>
  </Gather>
</Response>

The library is called ExTwiml. It’s available from Github or Hex.

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