How to Send a Sms and wait for reply in Python using Twilio?

Question

I am trying to create a vaccine appointment scheduler in Python. I am reading data currently from an Excel Sheet which has the time slots and the phone numbers and I am sending them the text as:

import csv              
from twilio.rest import Client
account_sid = ''
auth_token = ''
client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)
name='Test'
f = open(name+'.csv')
csv_f = csv.reader(f)   
data = []

for row in csv_f: 
    data.append(row)

f.close()
for row in data:
    if (data):
        firstname = row[0]
        
        phone_number = row[3]
        print(phone_number)
        time = row[5]
        confirmation = row[6]
        print(confirmation)
        nl = '\n'
        message = client.messages \
                        .create(
                            body=f"{firstname},\n\nCOVID Vaccine appointment confirmation on March 17th, {time} at .\n\nYour confirmation number is {confirmation}. Please show this message at your arrival.\n\nWe have LIMITED parking, please show up on time.\n\nYou MUST register using the form below before your appointment.\n\n\n ",
                            from_='+1',
                            to=f'+1{phone_number}'
                        )

    print(message.sid)
    #print (firstname,lastname,phone_number,time)

Now, I want to have a feature where I can ask the user to send 1 to confirm and 2 to cancel. How do I achieve that? Any documentation or code snippets would be helpful.

Answer 1

Check out the Twilio docs on How to Receive and Reply to SMS and MMS Messages in Python .

The basic flow being:

• Send out the SMS (your code) and store to whom you've send it and their appointment details in some kind of database/cache.
• Receive SMS via your new endpoint, this does a look up in the database/cache and marks them confirmed or cancelled.

For this to work you would need to connect the webhook of your from number in Twilio to the new endpoint for receiving SMS which you need to create.