How to call 200 UK cell phones simultaneously and deliver a recorded message?

Question

Working on a fun element for a big company event.

I would like to find a way to call 200 UK cell/mobile numbers as simultaneously as possible and deliver the same recorded message to each of them. All of the target devices belong to people attending the event.

Anybody managed to do something similar?

I think I could do this with Twilio's APIs, but a more packaged solution is preferred.

Any risk of overwhelming the local cells by trying to start a call with so many devices in the same area at once?

Answer 1

Twilio Evangelist here.

This is totally possible with Twilio and some simple programming logic. With the numbers you have, you can loop through them and create phone calls like so (in Python):

for num in number:
    # Create a phone call
    client.calls.create(
        to=num, 
        from_='MY_TWILIO_NUMBER', 
        url='http://mywebsite.com/instructions.xml'
    )

The url here (final line) will provide some basic TwiML to play an MP3 file.

There are solutions for this available, but it is likely you'll be able to build this in software faster than you will be able to get the solution running, especially if this is for a one-time event and you have some software people handy.

If you need any help, let me know!