Twilio conference - Handle no one answering

Question

I want my main number to call two people and have them placed into a conference. My question is how to handle if one or both people don't answer the phone. If person A joins and is waiting for person B and they don't pick up, does the conference just end? Is person A waiting indefinitely? Not sure what is the best practice to gracefully handle this situation.

Thanks, EE

Answer 1

Twilio evangelist here.

If you're placing outbound calls via the REST API and dropping them into a conference when they answer then yes, PersonA would wait indefinitely in the conference call (actually 4 hours since that is the max call length allowed).

What you can do is include the StatusCallback parameter when you initiate the outbound phone call. Twilio will make a request to this URL when the call ends (or is never answered) and pass as part of the request to that URL a CallStatus parameter which will tell you why the call ended.

You can use the value of CallStatus to redirect Person A out of the conference if needed.

Hope that helps.