Building an emergency hotline for your dog

Our dog has a tag on his collar with our phone numbers on it. However, because phone call spam is so prevalent, we also have our phones set to block calls from unknown numbers. If our dog gets out and we don’t realize immediately, we would likely miss the call. What’s a doggo parent to do?

Luckily for me, I’ve been using Twilio for work projects and I knew this would be a straightforward task. Using Twilio, we can:

1. Buy a phone number for $1/month that accepts incoming calls/SMS
2. Set up that number to forward calls to your and your partner’s phones
3. Set up that forwarding to ring from that same number, so you can save it in your address book as Pet Emergency Line
4. [optional] In your address book, set up that number to bypass Do Not Disturb and set up a special ring tone for it

To top it all off, you don’t need to host any code for this! We’ll be taking advantage of Twilio’s TwiML Bins (Twilio Markup Language Bins) to store the forwarding instructions. The rest is configured in Twilio’s console.

Buy a phone number

https://www.twilio.com/console/phone-numbers/search

Pick a number, any number

Set up TwiML Bins for Voice and SMS Forwarding

https://www.twilio.com/console/twiml-bins

For Rings:

• callerId is the number you purchased
• Add 1, 2 or more <Number>s

For SMS:

• From is the number that sent the SMS
• Body is the body of that SMS

Configure your phone number to use the TwiML Bins

You can find your number at:

https://www.twilio.com/console/phone-numbers/incoming

Click into the number

Scroll down to Voice & Fax and Messaging

Remember to “Save”. That’s it! Try calling and texting the number to verify that both phones ring/receive the message.