Question

I know how to send and receive SMS in Twilio. What I don’t know is how to build a PHP server application to send an SMS message with a question and, in case a SMS response for that question is not received in a specified amount of time (2 minutes or other value), would send a SMS reminder and restart the timer.

Can anyone help me out?

Answer 1

Any time you want to do something on a schedule, you need to use a scheduler of some sort. PHP does not have one built in (like the Ruby delayed_job gem), so you’d need to write a cron job or use something like Moment.

The workflow would go something like this:

• Send the initial message using the Twilio REST API
• Log that the message was sent in your app’s data store with a timestamp for the time it was sent
• When a response is received, mark the log entry as completed
• Use the scheduler to run a process every minute or so looking for unanswered messages
• If your scheduled process finds a message that has ‘expired’, mark it as expired and re-send the message with a new log entry.