Twilio is a cloud platform that allows you to easily integrate web-delivered services into telecommunications infrastructure: voice calling, SMS messaging and more. Their programmable SMS works as illustrated below:

• You sign up to Twilio and receive developer credentials / tokens
• You register a new number linked to Twilio’s platform that can be used to send and receive messages
• Twilio will manage the communication for that number
• You will be able to have Twilio route incoming SMSs as a HTTP request (or webhook) to an endpoint on your web service
• This endpoint will response in a Twilio prescribed format and that response will be picked up by their servers, and ultimately routed back to the SMS sender as a reply
• You can use Twilio’s API (application programming interface) to send SMSs (this allows your platform to initiate conversations too)

Image Credit: Twilio.com

Their video describes the process pretty well. Take a look here:

Find out more:

• Programmable SMS