ON-DEMAND GROUP CALLING
Triggered through a web link, SMS or API call
Get the right group of people together at the right time with a simple web-click, the sending of a text message or an API call
Traditionally, to get people onto a group or conference call, you would need to either pre-schedule the call for a particular time or go through a tedious setup process via a web portal or application, sending invites and so forth.
But what about when you need to get a group of people together on a call right now, quickly? Maybe be it’s a school closure event; factory safety emergency; industrial plant security breach; care facility health matter or any number of other scenarios.
You want the call to happen now, without a complicated setup and where there may be a number of people who could decide the call needs to take place – this is where Alerting Hub comes in.
Multiple scheduling and trigger options
With Alerting Hub you can register the details of the call with us ahead of time using our sendalert API call and ask us to defer it to only be activated on a particular condition (we call it a trigger). Those conditions can include sending an SMS to us with a particular keyword or clicking on a web-link that we’ve sent to you (via SMS and/or email) as part of the registration of the call.
If you don’t want to pre-register and use our trigger capability you can simply invoke our sendalert without asking us to defer matters and we’ll start the call straight away. Or if you do know ahead of time exactly when you want the call to start you can do that again using our sendalert API call but this time provide a schedule for us to work to.
On-demand group calling as part of a multi action alerting process
As is always the case with Alerting Hub, you’re not limited to just a group-call on its own, you can also include sending SMS and emails to a variety of recipients, regardless of whether that’s ‘now’, deferred until you need it or scheduled for a later time.
As an example, you could register with Alerting Hub a complete event-response scenario that tells us: call all the people in your on-call response team and put them into a group call; at the same time also send SMS messages to your backup team and simultaneously send emails to your senior management. We’ll remember all of that and keep things ‘on-ice’ until you need them.
When the crisis breaks and you need that response to happen then whoever you’ve given the SMS keyword or web-links to (such as your control-centre staff, on-call manager etc.) can simply send an SMS, or click the web-link and we’ll activate everything right then and there, the group-call will be made, people’s phones will begin to ring, SMS will be sent out and emails delivered.
Group calling examples
Enough of the theory, let’s take a look at some examples of how you can get Alerting Hub to make those group calls.
We’ll start with some basic samples that will start the group call as soon as you issue the sendalert API call to us; we’ll then move on to some complex examples including deferred event responses mentioned above.
The basics – making a simple group call
In this example, we show how you can specify who should be in the group call and a basic message that each hears before they confirm that they wish to join in, we’ll use our Text-to-Speech capability so there’s no need to pre-record audio files.
{
"version": "latest",
"apiKey": " abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz",
"clientRef": "aReference",
"alert": [
{
"alertType": "call",
"recipientList": "+441604100100,+441604100101",
"tag": "t1",
"content": "This is a demo group call, please press any key to join",
"contentEncoding": "utf8",
"voiceFormat": "tts",
"tts": { "language": "en-GB", "gender": "FEMALE", "enhancedTts": false },
"ivrControl": {"ivrType": "group"}
}
]
}
That’s it, just send that JSON to our sendalert API call and your group-call will be underway.
As you can see, to specify who’s in the call – we’ve used the recipientList form which is Alerting Hub’s simplest mechanism. In effect it’s just a list of phone numbers, email addresses and so forth.
We support alternative and richer forms such as contact groups and contact sets; which are described in more detail in the recipients and contacts section. We also support the storing of all these forms so you can pre-load Alerting Hub with them and then just specify those stored items instead of having to list phone numbers every time. In fact you can store pretty much any part of an alert or even the entire alert itself. We’ll do other blog posts on contact groups and stores in more detail at a later time.
Enhancing the experience – validate the participants
In some instances, it may be preferable to ensure the right people are answering their phones. We have therefore made it possible to add a PIN check and other features:
{
"version": "latest",
"apiKey": " abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ",
"clientRef": "aReference",
"alert": [
{
"alertType": "call",
"recipientList": "+441604100100,+441604100101",
"tag": "t1",
"content": "This is a demo call, please confirm your pin number ",
"contentEncoding": "utf8",
"voiceFormat": "tts",
"tts": { "language": "en-GB", "gender": "FEMALE", "enhancedTts": false },
"ivrControl": { "ivrType": "group", "ivrPin" : "1234" },
"additionalContent": [
{
"content": "Thank you, you are now being place into the group call",
"contentEncoding": "utf8",
"contentTag" : "enter",
"voiceFormat": "tts",
"tts": { "language": "en-GB", "gender": "FEMALE", "enhancedTts": false }
},
{
"content": "Sorry that pin was not recognised",
"contentEncoding": "utf8",
"contentTag" : "badpin",
"voiceFormat": "tts",
"tts": { "language": "en-GB", "gender": "FEMALE", "enhancedTts": false }
}
]
}
]
}
This time when you answer the group call you’ll hear the initial prompt asking for a PIN, then you’ll hear either the validation or the rejection message. Again, pretty straightforward; you could send SMS to the recipients letting them know the PIN to use as part of the same sendalert API call or do that prior to the group call alert.
If you look at the sendalert API guide and the IVR guide you’ll find more information on how to fine-tune the various settings.
Want the group call later – set a schedule
If you wanted your group call to occur at a known date and time in the future and even to regularly repeat then you can add a schedule. We’ll take the simple call example again and this time add a schedule element to it so the call actually starts in 10 minutes:
{
"version": "latest",
"apiKey": " abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz",
"clientRef": "aReference",
"options": {
"schedule" : {
"start" : "now",
"delay" : "10m"
}
}
"alert": [
{
"alertType": "call",
"recipientList": "+441604100100,+441604100101",
"tag": "t1",
"content": "This is a demo group call, please press any key to join",
"contentEncoding": "utf8",
"voiceFormat": "tts",
"tts": { "language": "en-GB", "gender": "FEMALE", "enhancedTts": false },
"ivrControl": {"ivrType": "group"}
}
]
}
Schedules can be set using a variety of options, see scheduling and controlling alerts for more details
Want the group call when you need it – set a trigger
As described at the start of this blog post, it’s possible to use Alerting Hub to make a group call happen right at the crucial time you need it, even if you don’t know in advance when that time might be.
In this example we’ll use the simple group call sample again but this time we’re going to add the triggering by a unique web-link that you can share with anyone who’s authorised to start the call.
Not only will we specify the triggering but we’ll also send SMS containing the weblink out to a set of people so they have it ahead of time. All of that means that this example’s going to be a little bit more complex, don’t worry we’ll describe it fully after you’ve seen it.
Note that this time, as we’re effectively doing two alerts; one to setup the deferred group call and one to setup the trigger / get hold of the weblink, we’ll actually use the batchsend API call (you could issue two sendalert API calls instead if you wanted):
{
"version": "latest",
"apiKey": " abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz",
"common" : {
"clientRef": "aReference"
},
"alerts": [
{
"tag" : "Defer the actual group call alert",
"deferral" : {
"defer" : true,
"storeName" : "deferredGroupCall"
},
"alert": [
{
"alertType": "call",
"recipientList": "+441604100100,+441604100101",
"tag": "t1",
"content": "This is a demo group call, please press any key to join",
"contentEncoding": "utf8",
"voiceFormat": "tts",
"tts": { "language": "en-GB", "gender": "FEMALE", "enhancedTts": false },
"ivrControl": {"ivrType": "group"}
}
]
},
{
"tag" : "Setup triggers",
"trigger" : {
"storeDetails" : {
"storeName" : "deferredGroupCall"
},
"triggers" : [
{
"keyword" : "",
"type" : "shortlink",
"tag" : "sl1"
}
]
},
"alert" : [
{
"alertType" : "sms",
"tag" : "t1",
"content" : "To activate your group call simply click on this link {trigger_sl1_keyword}",
"contentEncoding" : "utf8",
"sender" : "AlertingHub",
"lookups" : {
"performLookups" : true,
"uniqueLookups" : true
},
"recipientList" : "+441604100100,+441604100101,+441604100102"
}
]
}
]
}
That might all look a little complicated at first but it’s really not. Let’s break it down. The 1st thing to notice is that we’ve got an ‘alerts’ array, that’s because we’re using batchsend which allows us to effectively issue multiple sendalerts without having to call them one-by-one.
The 1st element within the ‘alerts’ array is pretty much the same as the simple group call example but we’ve added the ‘deferral’ object that tells Alerting Hub to store this alert away under the name ‘deferredGroupCall’.
The 2nd element (that begins with “tag” : “Setup triggers”) is the alert that sets up the trigger. In this case it tells Alerting Hub to activate the stored alert ‘deferredGroupCall’ when the trigger is.
It also specifies what the trigger should be, in this case a web shortlink URL and it further then sends that shortlink URL in an SMS message to the same recipients as the group call plus one more.
Those three SMS recipients will receive a message something like: “To activate your group call simply click on this link: https://ahub.app/sl/123456”.
That’s it, no more action required until such a time as you need that group call, then all you do is click on the link sent and Alerting Hub will activate the stored group call alert and phones will start ringing.
You can see how easy it would be to enhance this example to also include SMS and emails being sent at the same time as the group call was triggered, you’d just need to add additional objects to the “alert” array of the 1st alert in the example:
"alerts": [
{
"tag" : "Defer the actual group call alert",
"deferral" : {
"defer" : true,
"storeName" : "deferredGroupCall"
},
"alert": [
{
"alertType": "call",
"recipientList": "+441604100100,+441604100101",
"tag": "t1",
"content": "This is a demo group call, please press any key to join",
"contentEncoding": "utf8",
"voiceFormat": "tts",
"tts": { "language": "en-GB", "gender": "FEMALE", "enhancedTts": false },
"ivrControl": {"ivrType": "group"}
},
{
"alertType": "sms",
"recipientList": "+441604100100,+441604100222",
"sender": "AcmeTrading",
"tag": "t2",
"content": "The group call has been activated",
"contentEncoding": "utf8"
}
]
