Major companies often use texting to cast polls and votes. Was wondering if anyone had a civilian's implementation.
I'm completely unfamiliar with SMS servers, but in general I thought it'd be necessary to set up an SMS server to process the texts which then would bounce that to a web server with the db. New to this kind of technology, honestly if I knew what to google I'd probably be able to dig up the info.
You need an SMS gateway. Twilio has a particularly simple API.
Related
I'm back again with a question about NLP. I made my own back-end, which on one side can connect to websites, the Google Assistant and Facebook Messenger, and on the other end to Dialogflow. On the side, is logs interactions and does some other database stuff.
Now, I'm trying to connect this back-end to Alexa. I made a project which calls my endpoint. This project has one intent, which has a paramater which should get the raw user input, send it to my back-end, process it, parse and send the response to get back. I feel like there is not a real way to collect and send the raw user input, so I can process it myself (on Dialogflow) instead of using the Amazon way of mapping intents and such.
I know Dialogflow can export to Alexa, but this is not an option for me. I really hope one of you can point me in the right direction.
I just need a way to collect the raw user input, and respond in an Alexa accepted response format.
For Actions on Google for example, I'm using a Custom Project Action Package.
Thanks a lot in advace!
To accept or get any user input, you can use sys.any in google assistant and AMAZON.SearchQuery in AMAZON ALEXA.
In Alexa, You have to add the carrier phrase to use AMAZON.SearchQuery. You can't combine any other slot with AMAZON.SearchQuery.
So there are also some limitations. I hope this answer will help you.
I am planning to create a mobile application for android and ios users, i think i will take a try with xamarin since i will be alone on this project and i don't have a lots of time.
I want that the mobile app for both platform get datas from the api, then if there is new datas available we notify the user by a notification.
How the mobile will work in that kind of project? I mean should i make a background service then check every x seconds/minutes by http request? In that case which time interval? Should i use websockets instead for this case?
The app might be used by many people, so i would to know the scenario in this kind of project: Getting very fast changes, without overload the server due to too many connects or whatever else.
I'm confused about this and i need some lights around, any mobile application/server experiences related would be apprecied!
EDIT:
As suggered by an user, here additional infos:
The api is homemade, restful using JWT made in NodeJS.
Each users on their device should get messages from server asap, even when the app is in background/closed.
Maybe in the future a way to send messages between users themselves.
You have to implement push notification.
It is quite easy to implement this in xamarin. just send the push notification to the device and on the notification received call back send the API request to retrieve the updated data.
Here is the document for sending push notification from custom API.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/appcenter/push/pushapi
I'm not a mobile developer, so take this with a grain of salt.
The answer to this really depends on what you're doing, which informs how often to check the API. If it's a messaging app, for example, you could have it check every couple minutes to see if there are undelivered messages, then check more frequently for the next X minutes (to facilitate a conversation in real time).
If it's a GPS navigation app to be used while driving, you'd need much more frequent requests.
As for the API, that also depends on what type of API and the number of requests you can make to it. Is it a commercial API that you get x number of calls per hour on? Is it an API that you built? Etc.
Basically, you need to give more information in order to get more specific answers.
I am using the node-whatsapi library
I am getting the number blocked. I am following the exact protocol as mentioned in the WIKI.
The flow that i follow is:
Create Adapter
Connect()
On Connect - Login
On Login
sendIsOnline()
requestPrivacySettings()
requestServerProperties()
requestContactsSync()
For Each Contact sendPresenceSubscription(), getStatus() and getProfilePicture()
And when i receive a message:
adapter.requestContactsSync('1234567890', 'delta', 'background');
getProfilePicture()
Save to DB
Now, what we do and why do we use WhatsApi
We enable our existing Customers to talk to their internal teams on WhatsApp. So, a customer initates a chat and a help desk team responds to them on an application.
Got the number blocked now. Unable to understand where am i going wrong.
Also, the total number of messages exchanged between the customer and the helpdesk team is around 1k a day.
What you're "doing wrong" is using a third party API which is against WhatsApp's terms of service and, if detected, will get your relevant accounts blocked. It's not a fault with WhatsAPI itself or how you are using it.
WhatsApp openly publishes the only approved/compliant way to programmatically interact with their network.
http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/iphone/23559013
http://www.whatsapp.com/faq/en/android/28000012
Outside of that, you are going to get blocked whenever you are detected as using an unapproved means of interacting with their network.
In your particular example you're using a Node.js port of the original WhatsAPI. As of May 2015 this is the kind of pressure they are dealing with from WhatsApp (despite many years of trying to negotiate an amicable compromise with them around things like message limits and identity verification):
It sucks but that's just how it is. You can look at some alternatives which are still actively updated and may continue working for a while, but given that WhatsApp is now owned by Facebook and considering the kind of legal resources at their disposal, you should be able to see why one might be reluctant to continue updating a rogue API.
Well, got a satisfactory answer from WhatsApi collaborator matteocontrini.
Here is the answer that i got, if somebody is intrested.
It says:
the reason of getting blocked doesn't have to be because you wrote
wrong code. It could be a filter on the kind of messages you send or a
report from someone about your number.
I'm writing a bot in node.js using node-xmpp. So far it's pretty straight forward except I'm having an issue with figuring out how google Talk handles it's user authorization (when dealing with requesting to chat with someone NOT on your roster).
I'm catching all stanzas coming through and logging them to the console but there is no data coming from the user that is requesting authorization.
Any explanations of what I should be looking for or if this event even happens over the jabber protocol.
[appended] I know that technically when a subscription request is made a presence stanza is sent with the subscription request. I can't see these coming over the wire using node-xmpp for some reason. Also, I need to find out a way to determine what presence requests are "pending" when my bot logs in. I thought (innacurrately) that they would be listed in the roster with some sort of flag, but that's not correct.
Any help with finding out where to go from here would be useful.
Ok, I finally figured out how to get the subscription requests after they have been made. There isn't much info on it out there so I'll put together a blog post, but I feel that answering it here might be good as well.
I found that if I did a google roster query based on the below information:
http://code.google.com/apis/talk/jep_extensions/roster_attributes.html
example stanza:
<iq from="username#gmail.com/D2D4E5A8" type="get" id="google-roster-1"><query xmlns="jabber:iq:roster" xmlns:gr="google:roster" gr:ext="2"/></iq>
The server would respond first with your pending server subscription "presence" stanzas
ex:
<presence type="subscribe" from="pendinguser#gmail.com" to="namehere#gmail.com/D2D4E5A8" xmlns:stream="http://etherx.jabber.org/streams" xmlns="jabber:client"/>
and then the rest of your roster's "presence" stanzas. It's important to note that your subscription "presence" stanzas don't get sent to you from the server unless you do a roster query. I'm not sure why this is and why it's not documented somewhere is beyond me. Anyways, at least I can get the list of people trying to get access to my bot now.
Note: This is not my area of knowledge just an interest of mine. I have not got practical experience just a bit of research. This would have been a comment however doing some more searching on the topic, I have come up with some more things that might help.
Here's a google chat chat room homepage http://partychapp.appspot.com/ you can get the source http://code.google.com/p/partychapp/
Those links came from http://xmpp.org/2010/02/xmpp-roundup-13-services/ which has quite a few other resources that might be helpful.
http://code.google.com/p/node-xmpp-bosh/ has some code about that, I've not done it but the topic is interesting.
I hope if you do find the answer your after you write up a blog post and or a project and share it. It would be of interest to me.
I am developing a website -- in the prototype stage, soon to be alpha. I will provide an email address to each account that allows the user to deposit stuff -- not a real email account, just an endpoint for sending things to the site. Many sites provide this kind of service nowadays. I think the first one I saw was Photobucket, which let's you send photos as email attachments.
My question is, what is the best way to implement this kind of service?
In my prototype, I have written a POP3 client which fetches all newly delivered mail (currently from a test Gmail account). My service processes each new mail and attachments, and immediately removes it from the email server.
I could certainly outsource to an email service with POP3 and be done with it. The problem is cost. Most services I have seen provide much more than I need, and they charge per account. I expect to have many accounts and low traffic volume.
So I'm leaning towards hosting email receipt myself. I am open to Windows or Linux. The code that processes incoming emails runs on Windows, but I have other services running on Linux. I have seen a number of open source and free email servers, such as hMailServer and MailEnable (Windows) and qmail, Postfix and exim (Linux).
I guess I have a slight preference towards Linux because of lower hosting costs, but if a Windows service can provide cleaner integration, that might be worth it. As far as features, I would like to have some spam filtering, but it's is not a huge priority. POP3 is adequate for retrieval, but a more direct API would be nice. I will need some kind of API for programmatically provisioning new accounts.
All suggestions are appreciated. Do you know how others implement this kind of service?
UPDATE: I ended up using hMailServer, which is a free mail server that runs on Windows. It seems to be quite mature and robust. It has a COM interop library which makes accessing emails, accounts, etc. from my .NET server app very easy indeed.
If you're going the host-your-own-email-server route, I would probably just use POSTFIX and pipe all your email to a PHP script, which processes the email.
Here's a quick'n dirty tutorial on setting up the email pipe if you're using cPanel:
http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_to_pipe_an_email_to_a_PHP_script.html
If not, here's how to do it:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=562518
The bottom line is, you need to have an open SMTP connection to accept email. If you have your own server, then you can install a SMTP server on the machine. Usually, you have filesystem access to the location the email files are placed. Be sure to select a SMTP server that allows this, and that the email are in a format that you can parse.
Then, you can just monitor the file location for incoming emails.
If you can't pipe your emails (using the Postfix suggestion), and you don't have your own server (for example, on a shared hosting plan), then you will need to query a POP3 or IMAP mailbox server for your emails, and parse them accordingly.
I wanted to get emails in real time so I worked out my own solution with google app engine. I basically made a small dedicated google app engine app to receive and POST emails to my main site. That way I could avoid having to set up an email server.
You can check out Emailization (a little weekend project I did to do it for you), or you this small GAE app that should do the trick.
I kinda explained it more on another question.
Hope that helps!