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How to customize silly "Hello from Twilio!" SMS reply? (sent out when recipient doesn't use known keyword)

I'm sending out SMS in an application. Some portion of the users use the well known unsubscribe keywords like STOP, stop and alike. Some people reply back like there was human on the other end. Like "Why am I getting this message".

Here comes the interesting thing: in such case Twilio replies with a silly "Hello from Twilio!" SMS, which confuses the recipient even more (the recipient is involved with a service with company X and doesn't know at all that we use Twilio for SMS delivery).

Where can I change that message? I'm using the Twilio API to send SMS from our back-end, I don't have any messaging service configured (and I don't even want to have any unless I have to) just as I don't want any "Advanced Opt-Out for Messaging Services" because I don't want to override or customize any unsubscribe keywords or anything. I just want to have a more meaningful reply SMS than the silly "Hello from Twilio!".

Solution

  • Twilio developer evangelist here.

    In your phone number configuration, which you can find by navigating to your list of phone numbers then clicking on the phone number, you can scroll down to find the messaging section. It looks a bit like this:

    enter image description here

    You may have a demo URL set in the field for what happens when "A message comes in". That demo URL is likely returning the "Hello from Twilio!" response to incoming messages.

    To override this, you can either remove the URL entirely, or set it to your own response. You can use this to alert your users that the number is not monitored, or just not respond. To do this, I'd recommend using a TwiML Bin as they let you host static TwiML that can react like this.

    If you want to use a TwiML Bin to stop the number responding at all, set up a TwiML Bin with this TwiML:

    <Response/>

    If you'd like to send a message of your own in response, use this TwiML:

    <Response>
  <Message>Thanks for messaging, but messages to this number are not monitored. If you want to opt out of messages, send STOP.</Message>
</Response>

    Fill in your own message, of course.