Say the current time and day in TwiML

Question

My grandma has dementia and a programmable landline. She misdoes her medication because she can't remember what day or time it is. I've set up a Twilio service with the idea that she can press 'Time' on the phone to dial the number, and it will play back the current day and time.

My code so far looks like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
    <Say voice="alice" language="en-AU" loop="2">Today is DAY. Right now, it is TIME.</Say>
</Response>

Where day would be replaced by the weekday (e.g. Saturday) and the TIME would be something like 8:34 PM.

How can I make these values dynamic?

try using a twilio Function where you can easily write a function to say the date and time — jack, Jan 23 '22 at 05:32

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 23 '22 at 23:51

Twilio developer evangelist here.

As jack suggests, you can do this with a Twilio Function to dynamically generate the time. You also asked this on Reddit and my colleague answered you with some code. To not reinvent the wheel, I'm going to post that code here too.

You'll want to create a Twilio Function and enter the following code:

exports.handler = function(context, event, callback) {
  let twiml = new Twilio.twiml.VoiceResponse();

  let timeZone = "Australia/Sydney";
  let now = new Date();

  let dayOfWeek = now.toLocaleString("en-AU",
        {timeZone: timeZone, weekday: "long"});
  let currentTime = now.toLocaleString("en-AU",
        {timeZone: timeZone, hour: "numeric", minute: "numeric"});

  twiml.say(`Hello Grandma, today is ${dayOfWeek}. Right now it is ${currentTime}`,
        {voice: "alice", language: "en-AU", loop: 2});
    
  return callback(null, twiml);
};

Save and deploy the function, then configure your phone number to use the Function when a call comes in.

This returns TwiML containing a message like: "Hello Grandma, today is Saturday. Right now it is 11:51 pm". You might need to change the time zone in the code above depending on where you are in the world. I've guessed "Australia/Sydney" because of your use of "en-AU" in the question but apologies if that's not right for you (there's a big list of timezone names here).

Say the current time and day in TwiML

1 Answers1