Roll Call! Roger Stringer Shows You How to Take a Headcount During A Twilio Conference Call

Roll Call! Roger Stringer Shows You How to Take a Headcount During A Twilio Conference Call

In an ideal world, the start of every conference call would be seamless. Everyone is on the line and everyone knows who is on the call. But, things don’t always work that well. The start of a conference call can leave people talking over each other in an effort to introduce themselves and leave others pretty peeved about the whole process.

Roger Stringer, Twilio-ninja and author of the Twilio Cookbook, put together a roll call feature that allows you to take a headcount of your conference call programmatically.

Check out Roger’s original post on GitHub here.

How to Make a Roll Call During a Twilio Conference Call

Twilio’s conference calling functionality is great in that it is simple to set up, but powerful with just a few tweaks.

In this post, we’re going to set up a moderated conference system with a twist, we’re going to build a roll call system, so that when a moderator presses the * button, they will redirect to a page which will read back a list of participants, then the moderator back into the conference.

I know, that sounds like a useful feature when you’ve got a scheduled conference call and want to make sure everyone has called in before starting.

So, today, we’re going to show you how to set up a roll call system. To do this, we need a bit of setup.

First, let’s set up the non-moderated caller TwiML when participants call in:

Let’s call this file conference.xml.

Callers who call into this number will be met with a message that the conference will begin when the moderator joins.

Second, we need the TwiML for moderators. So that when a moderator joins, we could append an action on to the that would trigger a call to a file which would then announce the end of the conference.

Let’s call this file conferencemod.xml.

Finally, we want to add the code to handle when a moderator presses the * button on their phone.

This will call a file called rollcall.php, which will present the moderator with a list of participants as a roll call, then forward the moderator back into the conference.

Notice, we set the endConferenceOnExit to false? This is because we don’t want to end the conference at this time, we just want the moderator to hear a list of participants, then get forwarded back into the conference. In this case, the conference would end when everyone hung up their calls.

First, we would get a count of particpants still on the conference.

Second, we would cycle through each participant and that participant’s phone number to the moderator.

Finally, we Redirect the moderator back into the Conference .

Let’s create rollcall.php:

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