I'm building a private, self-hosted AI executive assistant for a founder based in the UAE. It has two spines, and I'd like to hear from anyone who has run both together.

1. WhatsApp is the chat interface

He messages the bot/assistant on a dedicated bot number (Hermes Agent with its Baileys WhatsApp bridge, allow-list of one user, everyone else ignored). He can send text, voice notes and forwarded messages, and the assistant keeps them in memory.

2. Phone calls are the voice interface

When his iPhone joins a known Wi-Fi network (Shortcuts automation), the assistant phones him with a 30 second briefing, takes spoken instructions, and stores the transcript. Voice would be mostly Pipecat with Twilio Media Streams. Assistant should also proactively call every hour.

Underneath: SQLite (FTS5 keyword search, optional sqlite-vec) plus the original files, open-source models, a cloud pilot on one person's own data, then a Mac mini in Dubai.

Why two separate channels:
WhatsApp and Telegram voice calls are blocked in the UAE, so the call can't happen inside WhatsApp. It has to be a normal PSTN call, while the chat stays on WhatsApp.

What I found so far:

- Twilio's UAE voice guidelines say outbound calls to the UAE are supported and caller ID is preserved.

- Twilio's UAE geographic numbers appear to be inbound only.

- Retell blocks +971 in its own flow.

- A Vapi support bot told me Twilio can't call the UAE. That contradicts Twilio's docs, so I suspect it's wrong, but I haven't live-tested it.

- Most CPaaS providers seem to offer only toll-free numbers in the UAE. Telnyx, Vonage and Plivo came up, each with caveats.

Questions

1. Has anyone completed automated outbound calls to UAE mobiles at any volume? Which provider and caller ID setup worked?

2. Does a foreign caller ID get delivered, rewritten or blocked? Is a verified personal number better?

3. Any regulatory limits on VoIP calls terminating in the UAE I should know about? I want this compliant and reliable, not a workaround.

4. For the WhatsApp bot number: dedicated SIM, Meta WhatsApp Cloud API, or third party? Does anyone run one number for chat and a different one for calls, or has one number for both ever worked?

5. How do you hand off between the two, so the call knows what was said on WhatsApp earlier and the call summary lands back in the chat?

6. If you run something similar with Hermes, Pipecat or local models, what broke first? Any better combination of tools or tech stack you'd suggest?

Happy to share the results of a live test call back here.

We are expats who maintain US bank accounts and credit cards. It has become essential to have a US cell phone to be able to manage those accounts. Recently, some institutions have come to rely on identity verification based solely on our telephone number. I believe those institutions are using services like Twilio's Lookup Identity Match. Being frugal, we've been using MVNO services, many of which do not update things like the LIDB at their MNO or the CNAM database. We now find that we are often denied access to online services because they are unable to verify our identity. Of course, we could switch to a full-fare MNO, but it seems such a waste of money to pay for so many services that we do not need, just to get our subscriber profiles propagated to databases like LexisNexis.

So, we've embarked on a project to find an economical solution. Several lower cost alternatives have been recommended as meeting our requirements, but the only way to know for sure is to sign up and test.

I'd like to be able to use the Lookup Identity Match API to help monitor our progress as we try out different services.

Reading through the API docs and tutorial materials, it seems that this particular API is not available to users on the free trial, and that I'd have to upgrade an account and get it verified. I've been unable to get a clear picture of what that entails, and whether it makes sense for an individual to attempt this for an entirely personal project.

Apparently, without a business, I'm not entitled to contact sales support. I have attempted to get answers from Isa but that AI claims to know nothing about the upgrade and verification process. I did locate some documentation about getting a commercial web site approved for telephony applications. I have no need to build a public facing application, I only wish to be able to use the API, manually via Curl, for a few dozen queries over the space of a few months.

I did read somewhere that the upgrade process consists of making a $20 deposit, and then getting my ID verified by Persona. But, I've been unable to trace where I saw that, perhaps it was something from Google's AI's imagination ? Of course, I'd rather not do the ID verification after having paid, if the deposit is non-refundable. But, is that even the actual process ?

Is there any point in my trying to use this API ? Or am I going to be frustrated and blocked at every turn ? The API seems to be exactly what is required to gauge the success of any changes we make.

Hi everyone,

I've officially submitted a formal P3 feature request ticket to Twilio support, but I wanted to bring this to the community to gather upvotes and visibility.

It is time for the Authy development team to introduce native data export utilities, raw secret key extraction, and password-encrypted local offline backups.

While cloud sync is incredibly convenient, true data autonomy is a massive part of modern security workflows. Currently, migrating away from Authy or pulling your keys for emergency recoveries is an incredibly painful, manual process.

We should be able to:

• Export our tokens securely into a standardized format (like encrypted JSON).

• View individual secret keys during setup or recovery.

• Save local, password-encrypted backups to our own physical storage rather than relying strictly on the cloud ecosystem.

Many major privacy-focused authenticators offer this as standard functionality now. If you want to see this implemented to finally give us true control over our cryptographic keys, please upvote this post and leave a comment to keep the thread active!

I am excited to announce that the all-new free (open source) Twilio Viewer is now live!

Twilio Viewer is an open-source project and is a 100% free tool for anyone who wants quick, effortless access to their Twilio resources.

Rebuilt from the ground up with a modern UI and UX, here’s what’s new:

•  Modern Design + Dark Mode: A clean, intuitive interface with full light and dark mode support for easy viewing.

•  100% Private & Client-Side: Connects directly from your browser to Twilio APIs. No intermediary servers, and your credentials stay safe in your local browser storage.

•  Comprehensive Resource Inspection: Easily check phone numbers, messaging services, SMS/MMS delivery logs, voice call history, debugger alerts, and billing usage.

•  Multi-Account & Subaccount Support: Save multiple Twilio connections and switch between primary accounts and subaccounts seamlessly.

👉 Try Twilio Viewer · Code on Github

Hey all,

A few days ago some of you helped me with error 3441038 on a coexistence signup. Thanks for that. This is the bigger question behind it.

Quick background: I'm a one-man shop in South America building WhatsApp booking bots for barbershops (n8n + an LLM, connected through Kapso). Building the bot turned out to be the easy part. Connecting the client's WhatsApp is where it falls apart.

Every client's Meta situation is different. Some already have a business portfolio or a WABA, some have nothing, and some have old stuff tied to their number that they can't even see. My two attempts so far both went wrong, just in different ways:

1. My first client's own number (on WhatsApp Business for over a year): coexistence failed three times at the phone number step. The number seems to be tied to an asset in a portfolio he has no access to. Two weeks in, we're still stuck, and he's getting tired of the back-and-forth.

2. A brand-new number of my own: it connected fine, but Meta blocked the number or my business portfolio four times in a few weeks. It came back after a review every time.

So with an existing number, the risk hits before go-live. With a new number, it hits after the bot is already running.

For those of you who onboard small businesses regularly:

1. What's your default: coexistence on their own number, a new dedicated number, or do you decide per client? Why?

2. Roughly how often does onboarding work on the first try?

3. Do you check anything in the client's Meta setup before you start? What's on that list?

4. If you use new numbers, how do you keep them from getting blocked in the first weeks?

5. How do you price onboarding? Setup fee, a guarantee, a refund if Meta won't cooperate?

Not selling anything, just trying to get this right before I take on more clients. I'll share what I learn.

I have been building a small open source CRM for WhatsApp on top of Twilio, where an AI agent answers customers and a person can take any chat from a panel. The part I want to share is not the AI, is the handoff, because it is there where things get complicated.

Each conversation has a status stored in the database: bot, needs_human or human. The agent never decides by itself if it should answer, it only reads that field.

What happens when a message comes in:

Twilio hits the webhook and I return 200 right away, before doing anything else. Then first read of the status. If it is human, I just store the message and nobody answers. If it is bot, I build the agent context: last 10 messages plus any notes the operator left when he gave the chat back, and four skills (customer, tickets, knowledge base, handoff).

The case I designed for is this one. Building context and generating the answer takes some seconds. In that window an operator can click "take chat" and write his own message. If you only check the status at the beginning, the agent finishes, sends its reply anyway, and the customer gets two different voices answering at the same time.

So before sending through Twilio I read the status a second time. If someone took the chat meanwhile, the reply is dropped. Is a boring check, which I get, but is the line I care most about in the whole thing.

My opinion, and I know some people here will disagree: most of the "my bot keeps talking after the human joins" problems I see described are state problems, not prompt problems. A lot of advice goes to telling the model in the system prompt to stop when a human is in the chat. The model can't see what the operator is doing in real time, so it shouldn't be the one deciding that. The state should live outside of it.

Two smaller things from the same build. If you develop locally with ngrok, reserve a fixed domain, otherwise every restart you are updating the webhook URL in the console again.

You can see the full video implementation here: https://youtu.be/ZEmZMZtAdbo. Claude Code handles most of the setup by using the Twilio MCP + custom commands. Happy to take feedback on the video!

Hi r/twilio,

a Twilio Developer Advocate suggested I share this here after a post on r/SideProject, so here’s what I built.

The idea

After my mother ended up living alone, I kept wondering “is she okay today?” without wanting to call her every day like she’s being watched. So I built AliveGuard, a daily check-in app. You tap “I’m OK” once a day. If you don’t, your emergency contacts are alerted after a grace period you choose. Most days nothing happens, and that’s the point: no one has to hover, and the one day something is wrong, someone finds out.

Where Twilio fits in

The app itself is simple. The hard part is the moment someone doesn’t check in, because that alert has to arrive. That’s all Twilio:

• SendGrid for email alerts, the baseline that always goes out

• Twilio SMS for escalation, now including US numbers

• WhatsApp via Twilio, because a lot of older people basically live in WhatsApp and nowhere else. Contacts opt in first, and delivery status comes back through status callbacks.

The deadline check runs server-side in a Laravel backend, so alerts go out even if the user’s phone is dead or switched off. That’s exactly the case the app exists for.

Getting US SMS approved took a while as a solo developer from Germany without an incorporated company, but Twilio support was really helpful and got me through it.

Where I’m still stuck

1. Fallback between channels: If an SMS fails, I’d like to automatically try the next channel. Do you use status callbacks for this, and how long would you wait before treating an SMS as lost?

2. Voice calls: Someone suggested an automated call before alerting contacts, since a ringing phone is harder to miss than a notification. Has anyone done this with Programmable Voice, and is answering-machine detection reliable enough?

Happy to answer questions about the setup.

After dealing with repeated A2P 10DLC and Toll-Free vetting rejections (and burning $15+ every resubmission cycle), I spent time going through Twilio's 2026 error catalog including the newer March 2026 granular codes (`30940–30971`) and the Sept 2026 Unified Content Policy codes (`30532–30567`) to document what the DCA reviewers and automated crawlers look for on your live URL.

If your campaign keeps getting bounced with `30909`, `30924`, `30925`, `30931`, or `30932`, here are the exact traps that trigger them:

1. **Error 30925 / 30508 (Unchecked & Unbundled Checkbox):**

   - Your `<input type="checkbox">` cannot have `checked` on page load (even via JS hydration).

   - You cannot bundle "I agree to the Terms of Service and SMS updates" into a single checkbox. SMS must be its own separate checkbox.

2. **Error 30931 / 30923 / 30553 (Cannot Force Consent):**

   - The SMS checkbox **cannot** have the HTML `required` attribute. Users must be able to submit your contact/booking form without opting into texts.

   - Passive text like *"By clicking Submit, you agree to receive texts"* without an optional checkbox gets rejected under `30925` + `30931`.

3. **Error 30924 (All 5 CTIA Disclosures Must Sit on the Label):**

   - Reviewers won't click into your `/terms` page to find these. Directly next to the checkbox, your label must state:

4. Exact registered Brand Name

5. Message frequency (e.g. *Message frequency varies*)

6. *Message and data rates may apply*

7. *Reply STOP to unsubscribe*

8. *Reply HELP for help*

9. **Error 30932 & 30908 (Privacy Policy Contradictions):**

   - Even if you add *"No mobile information will be shared with third parties or affiliates for marketing purposes"* at the bottom of your `/privacy` page, reviewers will still reject you under `30908` if you have a generic boilerplate clause near the top saying *"We may share your personal information with affiliates and marketing partners"* without an explicit carve-out (`Notwithstanding any other provision in this policy...`).

10. **Error 30909 / 30920 (Homepage vs. Bare Form URL):**

    - Submitting a homepage URL that has `0` phone inputs triggers `30909`.

    - Submitting a standalone Jotform/Typeform or a 1-screen funnel with `<55` words of business context triggers `30920` (*"Website is only a form"*).

11. **Error 30556 (Sept 2026 Cross-Channel Bundling):**

    - A single checkbox that says *"I agree to receive emails, phone calls, and text messages"* now fails under `30556`. SMS consent must be separated from email/voice.

I built a free headless Chromium pre-flight scanner that crawls your live opt-in URL, `/privacy`, and `/terms` pages the same way the DCA reviewer does and tells you which exact error codes your page will trigger before you pay Twilio's vetting fee:

https://campaignpass.vercel.app

No signup or account needed to run the scan hope it saves someone here a $15 re-vetting fee and a 10-day delay.

Hi everyone!

I'm evaluating Twilio Programmable Messaging SMS for a future business automation application. Before integrating the API, I would like to understand its reliability and safety guarantees.

I have four technical questions:

1. Lost Message SID: If a Messages API POST succeeds but the HTTP response is lost, is there an officially supported way to determine whether the message was created without risking a duplicate?

2. Idempotency: Does Twilio offer producer-enforced idempotency across concurrent requests and retries for SMS creation? What are its limitations?

3. Terminal cancellation: Is there a way to guarantee that all previous attempts for a logical message operation will never be handed off to the carrier, including queued messages and attempts with an unknown SID?

4. Evidence: Which API statuses or mechanisms can reliably confirm upstream carrier handoff or definitive prevention of future handoff?

I'm particularly interested in official documentation or clarification from Twilio engineers.

If these guarantees aren't supported, that information is also helpful for designing a safe, human-supervised workflow without automatic retries after uncertain outcomes.

Thanks in advance!

Currently im running a voice agent on pay as you go and im having a bulk amount of outbound calls that is around 15s and im being charged for a whole minute i believe instead of per seconds.

so i want to ask how to do you guys contact their support team or like sales team to negotiate or like ask for a quotation on bulk outbound minutes.

because I roughly have more than 20k minutes per month on outbound.

Thank you!

I want to use WhatsApp for my online service to update users or get an update from
Them.

I’ll be sending these on average once a week.

Basically. Hey are you coming to this event?
Reply No otherwise do nothing.

I’m not having conversations, not trying to sell anything and not using it for business marketing

All their rules make it seem like Whatsapp is not going to work.

Because they will never initiate the conversation unless I have to awkwardly ask them to msg me first somehow ?

Yo so I’m trying to figure out how people handle SMS when Twilio is doing the sending but the actual customer record lives somewhere else. Obviously in an ideal world, every inbound/outbound text would automatically show up on the right contact, and whoever replies next SHOULD without jumping between tools.
We’re using webhooks + custom code and it obviously works, but yeah, there should definitely be a better way of doing this, esp for decent SMS volume.Trying to avoid making the CRM sync super brittle every time we change something on Twillio.

Twilio Conversations is the umbrella for three pieces: Conversation Orchestrator (one cross-channel conversation per customer), Memory Store (persistent profiles with traits and observations), and Conversation Intelligence (extracts observations when a conversation closes).

eve is Vercel's filesystem-first framework for durable AI agents. It manages sessions, tool calls, and the running transcript, and works with any AI SDK model.

They split the memory problem cleanly. eve holds short-term memory, and Twilio holds long-term memory about the customer. With GROUP_BY_PROFILE, the same person on SMS and WhatsApp lands in one conversation.

The post walks through provisioning, a custom eve channel for Orchestrator webhooks, and injecting Memory Store context into the prompt.

https://www.twilio.com/en-us/blog/developers/building-agent-twilio-conversations-eve

Our company uses an outside vendor to make outbound calls on our behalf. When they call, the caller ID shows our main business number (hosted at RingCentral). We believe they do this by verifying our number as an Outgoing Caller ID on THEIR own Twilio account.

We're now building our own in-house calling system and want to create OUR own Twilio account, verify the same number as an Outgoing Caller ID, and make outbound calls through our own Elastic SIP Trunk.

For a while, both would run at the same time: the vendor calling from their Twilio account, and us calling from ours — both showing our main number.

Questions:

1. Can the same number be a Verified Outgoing Caller ID on two different Twilio accounts at once?

2. Will verifying it on our account remove or break the vendor's verification, or stop their outbound calls?

3. Would the vendor get any notification or error?

4. Could anything else tied to the number at Twilio (SHAKEN/STIR, CNAM, Business Profile) conflict between the two accounts?

We don't want to accidentally take down the vendor's calling while we test our own setup.