Keywords

Keywords are individual words that are registered with Alerting Hub and allow certain actions to be performed if the keyword is found within an incoming SMS message, email subject line or shortlink URL as received by Alerting Hub. Keywords are case-insensitive, must conform to certain standards (no whitespace, minimum and maximum lengths etc.) and must occur within the 1st 40 characters for SMS or email.

Keywords can currently be used to perform two types of action:

  • Triggering of a deferred / stored alert:
    • Could be used as a ‘panic-button’ to automate a group-call or SMS broadcast for example.
    • Keywords can be specified as part of the /sendalert API call and only last for the lifetime of the alert.
    • Keywords can include shortlink URLs.
    • See triggered alerts for more details.
  • Notification direct to you of a message arriving containing the keyword
    • Notification is via the usual push or collection of events (see below).
    • Provides the entire received message as part of the notification.
    • Keywords can only be registered for notification by request via your Alerting Hub account manager.
    • SMS and email subject lines only will be searched for keywords.

Notifications

When a keyword is detected in an SMS message or email subject line and that keyword is set to raise an event against an API key then either a callback is made on that API key’s web hook URL or the event is queued to be collected by the next /collectevents API call. The following example shows the type of event raised:

{
  "success": true,
  "returnCode": 200,
  "numEventsRemaining": 0,
  "events": [
    {
      "alerter": "+447976100100",
      "keyword": "mykeyword",
      "event": "keyword",
      "type": "sms",
      "alertees": [
        "+447976200200"
      ],
      "whence": "2021-07-26T08:44:14.000Z",
      "reply": "An SMS with MyKeyword in it",
      "replyEncoding": "utf8"
    }
  ]
}