Let bot make calls for you while your at work
By: Deepak Mohan Singh
Tags: Twilio, Zoho Cliq, Team Collaboration, Slack, Zoho

As IT professionals, working in a startup or a well established MNC, team collaboration is a must to be able to make things done in right way.

More than meeting a person directly and becoming a good friend, a quick chat in social sites are proving to be even more better to become friends too quick nowadays. The same applies to the teams you are put into. Unless you understand or become friend with your teammates, you cannot learn or do things quick. Chat apps for teams are proving to be one great way to get attached with teammates and even with higher authorities.

Chat tool like Slack has an extension which is entirely made to introduce a newbie to his/her teammates, so that every teammate would start the conversation in the group (called channel in slack) by waving.

I’ve written about one such chat app developed by Zoho in my previous blog. You can refer this if you wish to explore about this chat app for teams.

Now, coming back to teams, if you are busy at work and you need a teammate to view a message (say a file) in the app, you would send a direct message to him/her in your company’s chat app(Slack, Zoho Cliq, Microsoft Teams,etc). If the person isn’t online, you may wish to send an sms regarding the file. Or, if it’s much more important, you may make a call and ask your teammate to read file.

But, if you need to do the same to a bunch of people (say 10–15 teammates), would you keep sending sms or making calls and inform them about the file while you’re busy at your work? Or what if i tell you, that you don’t need to inform anyone about your file, but your bot will automatically call your teammates and inform them about the file? Sounds great. Right?

So this is one such idea that i thought to develop in chat apps for teams and i did one in a chat app Zoho Cliq and the name of the extension i developed is names “Twilio for chat apps”.

Twilio

Twilio is a developer platform for communications. Software teams use Twilio APIs to add capabilities like voice, video, and messaging to their applications. I decided to integrate this application with Zoho Cliq.

Twilio extension for Zoho Cliq

All you need to do is just create an account in Twilio and buy a number from it. Or if you don’t want to buy number, you can just create an account, an the rest is done by the extension itself for you.

(Twilio dashboard)

The main features of this extension if the use of bot. The bot does the following for you:

Inform message

Manage contacts

Update Credentials

Help

1. Inform Message

Inform message option is the main theme of this extension. The bot is there as your personal assistant as if you need to inform your teammate(s) about any urgent information and don’t want to get distracted from your ongoing work due to increased unwanted conversations.

The Inform Message option has four sub options and you can use anything as per your wish.

Send Sms

Make Call

Send file as sms

Send file as sms and alert receiver

Send sms

If you wish to inform any message to your teammate and he/she isn’t online on your company’s team chat app, you can send sms right from your desktop screen.

Make calls

If its an urgent message that you want to let your teammate know(“Keep your files ready as the Ceo is on the way” for example), then you don’t have to make call and inform him in your work time. Rather, your bot will do it for you. All you need to do is just instruct the bot with the message to be conveyed and to whom. It can be one person or as many number of persons you want.

(Make call dialog box in cliq)

Send files as sms

Let’s say you need your teammate to view a file who is unavailable in office today. You can send file even as a text sms. The bot automatically saves the file in docs(Zoho docs in this case) and sends a shareable link to the teammate.

Send files and alert receiver

This is an extension of previous option, where your bot calls the recipient and informs him/her about the file that has been sent as sms, like “Hey! Your teammate xyz has sent a file as sms, Please go through it.”

(Send file and alert dialog box in cliq)

The sender can also know whether the recipient picked up the call, or busy or the call went unanswered.

2. Manage Contacts:

Not only your teammates, but also your favorite contacts can be stored safely in your bot’s database and can send sms or make calls at your work time.

There is another new feature that has been added, but this is completely user configurable. This is “Two-way sms”. If you receive any sms at your work time, you will be notified at your desktop chat screen of your company’s chat app.

(Prompting to enable two way sms)

This is a bit distraction for few employees. So, this is an optional part. Further, there is another optional part in this feature. If you enable “Two-way sms”, you can configure who’s sms is to be displayed in your desktop screen. This is done because, you may get unwanted ads, company messages, unwanted or unimportant messages from your contacts. You can select who’s sms is not be notified in your screen.

(Option to select from whom to receive sms)

It took two months for me to develop this extension. If you are interested to check it out or feel that your company is using Zoho Cliq for communication, why not give a try?

Let me know how you found this useful! Thank you.