Virtual SMS Receiver

Receive and manage text messages in your evalink talos account

Hi, and welcome to another evalink tutorial!

In this tutorial, we will add and set up a new integration, the Virtual SMS Receiver into your evalink talos account.

Before you start, you will need a Twilio Account. You can get one here.

From your evalink talos dashboard, navigate to the menu Company, and click on the tab Integrations.

Search for Virtual SMS Receiver and click on: Add Integration.

Now, let’s configure the Virtual SMS Receiver integration.

Enter:

• the Twilio Account SID

• the Twilio authorization token

• and finally, the Twilio mobile phone number.

To finish the integration click on Submit.

The state should now change to "Enabled". If not, you should double check the credentials you entered in the previous step.

Now, the next step is to enable and configure the Virtual SMS Receiver on your site, so that you can allow the conversion of text messages into alarms for a particular site.

To add the Virtual SMS Receiver integration to a site, navigate to the menu Sites, pick the site to configure, click on the tab Integrations, and then click on SMS Receiver.

To enable the Virtual SMS Receiver, click on the button: Enable Virtual SMS Receiver.

evalink talos provides a generated authentication token that you can use to filter and authenticate your text messages.

Alternatively a phone number can be used to authenticate the incoming text messages. In that case, only the provided phone number is allowed to send text messages to evalink talos. If you want to use this option, you have to configure text mappings to react differently to each text depending on keywords within the body text of the incoming text message.

For this tutorial, we will proceed with the first authorization option, which is easier to configure.

As a verification step, you can use the provided example body to send a text which will trigger an alarm in evalink talos. To do this, you need to ensure that at least the token and the alarm code is included in the text message. Additionally you can also enter the alarm zone and value, or geolocation coordinates and other custom headers.

And...That’s it!

evalink talos is now configured to convert incoming text messages to the provided phone number into alarms!