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Overview

This guide shows how to broadcast voice messages to multiple recipients at once. You can play recorded audio when the call recipient answers or use text-to-speech, as we show here.You can use voice broadcasting for use cases such as:
  • Bulk voice calling campaigns
  • Emergency notifications
  • Survey campaigns
  • User feedback
  • Announcements
  • Promotions and special deals
  • Reminder campaigns
You can broadcast voice alerts either by using our PHLO visual workflow builder or our APIs and XML documents. Follow the instructions in one of the tabs below.
  • Using XML
Here’s how to broadcast voice alerts and notifications using XML.

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How it works

Plivo requests an answer URL when the call is answered (step 4) and expects the file at that address to hold a valid XML response from the application with instructions on how to handle the call. To see how this works, you can use https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.plivo.com/broadcast.xml as an answer URL to test your first outgoing call. The file contains this XML code:
<Response>
<Speak>Congratulations! You have made your first bulk call.</Speak>
</Response>
This code instructs Plivo to say, “Congratulations! You have made your first bulk call” to the call recipients. You can find the entire list of valid Plivo XML verbs in our XML Reference documentation.

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Prerequisites

To get started, you need a Plivo account — sign up with your work email address if you don’t have one already. If this is your first time using Plivo APIs, follow our instructions to set up a Node.js development environment and a web server and safely expose that server to the internet.

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Create voice alert broadcast application

Create a file called Broadcast.js and paste into it this code.
var plivo = require('plivo');

(function main() {
    'use strict';

    var client = new plivo.Client("<auth_id>","<auth_token>");
    client.calls.create(
        "<caller_id>", // from
        "destination_number1<destination_number2", // to
        "https://s3.amazonaws.com/static.plivo.com/broadcast.xml", // answer url
        {
            answerMethod: "GET",
        },
    ).then(function (response) {
        console.log(response);
    }, function (err) {
        console.error(err);
    });
})();
Replace the auth placeholders with your authentication credentials from the Plivo console. Replace the phone number placeholders with actual phone numbers in E.164 format (for example, +12025551234). Destination numbers may also be SIP endpoints, in which case each destination_number placeholder must be a valid SIP URI — for example, sip:john1234@phone.plivo.com.
Note: We recommend that you store your credentials in the auth_id and auth_token environment variables, so as to avoid the possibility of accidentally committing them to source control. If you do this, you can initialize the client with no arguments and it will automatically fetch them from the environment variables. You can use process.env to store environment variables and fetch them when initializing the client.

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Test

Save the file and run it.
node Broadcast.js