Voice telephone dial-out for notification

Devices & Integrations
1

I’ve seen the SmartThings channel here, https://ifttt.com/smartthings, and know this offers some telephony dial-out capability.

Has anybody else found a free or low-cost/pay-per-use service that would deliver phone notifications (sent until acknowledged) and integrated it into an app?

I know Twilio has a pretty complete solution and CDyne’s Phone Notify! service is purpose-built for this (but $10/month minimum).

Are there other options?

Hugh

2

You could use an emergency dialer, for example Skylink AD-105 or similar, and trigger it using FortrezZ MIMOlite dry contact bridge.

3

Thanks for that suggestion. I’m focusing on IP-based solutions but I’ll circle back to those if I strike out.

4

I have an idea, let me do some digging for an existing SmartApp that does http on status change. Then I can put something together, easily.

5

On second thought, what about the existing IFTTT integration do you not like? I just tested it with motion and with contact sensor to call me on change and it worked as expected.

1 Like
6

First, let me confess that I am an IFTTT noob.

My practical difficulty with IFTTT is that it doesn’t recognize (doesn’t list) my ST devices as inputs when I work on a recipe - unless I enable them for control. I have registered the channel and I assume the OAUTH stuff is set up and that UI indicated everything was readable by default. This doesn’t appear to be the case.

I also don’t like the fact that it only accepts one input instead of multiple (e.g. every door and motion contact in the house) and takes only one action (calls or turns on lights - again, only one light - but not both actions).

Additionally, I was hoping to keep the user-driven configuration/enabling in the ST app. By having it in IFTTT instead of the ST app, nobody else in my family can enable or disable the “alarm” at night.

On a less practical level, I didn’t love the idea of exposing all of my information (ST data, in this case) to yet another service provider (though I could probably get over that if it the practical considerations were addressed).

7

Here’s what I’ve come up with for Twilio. Once I get it tested and cleaned up a bit further I’ll publish.

String postUrl = "https://$AccountSid:$AuthToken@api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/$AccountSid/Calls"
String msgUrl = "http://twimlets.com/echo?Twiml=" + URLEncoder.encode("<Response><Say>$evt.linkText is $evt.value</Say></Response>", "UTF-8")


def params = [
    uri: "$postUrl",
    body: [
          Caller:"+16179999999"
        , Called:"+1$telnum"
        , Url: "$msgUrl"
    ]
]

   
try {
	httpPost(params) {
		response ->
8

Awesome it looks like you don’t actually need the app, you can likely get that going on your own. Because there is existing functionality I probably won’t do anything with this, at least in the near future. But here is a much cheaper solution that I use for other projects. It allows you to do calls and texts. This link is a referral link, if that bothers you just remove the ending a/signup/ref/44 http://www.onverify.com/a/signup/ref/44

I have been using the service for years, it’s very customizable, reliable and cheap!

9

Thanks, Matt. could you post a link to the API docs or is a registration required? Do they have a text-to-speech engine or is it strictly PIN-based?

The Twilio solution is pretty economical ($1/month to rent a number - if you decide to take it out of demo mode) but it doesn’t seem to have any retry logic. It’s not really built for notifications the way the CDYNE product ($10/month) is. I wonder if OnVerify is a bit more agressive about calling back.

10

(post withdrawn by author, will be automatically deleted in 24 hours unless flagged)

11

Yes I’m aware those screenshots contain my authentication. It won’t let me edit or delete them. @April @Ben can you remove those screenshots please. It’s also restricted by IP so I’m not too concerned.

12

Each IFTTT recipe can only take one action (That), but you can have the same trigger (THIS) trigger multiple actions by setting up multiple recipes.

It’s tedious, but it works. So Recipe 1: phone call turns on light A. Recipe 2: phone call turns on Light B. Etc.

Will Poirier discovered this for use with text hashtags and IFTTT. So a single text to IFTTT with hashtag #lights_off can turn off multiple lights, plus take other actions.

It’s just that they have to be set up as one device per recipe. But you can have more than one recipe with the same trigger.