The Web Speech API has two functions, speech synthesis, otherwise known as text to speech, and speech recognition, or speech to text. We previously investigated text to speech so let’s take a look at how browsers handle recognising and transcribing speech with the SpeechRecognition API.

Being able to take voice commands from users means you can create more immersive interfaces and users like using their voice. In 2018, Google reported that 27% of the global online population is using voice search on mobile. …

These are the things that you wish another developer had told you early in your career so that you never had to make the mistakes. This article is about one of those things, and if you’re reading this, consider it my warning to you.

File paths look like strings. You have a number of directories and maybe a file name with an extension at the end. You separate the directories and files with a / character and the result looks like /path/to/file. So you can treat them like strings, joining them or concatenating them until you pass them to another file method that is used to read from or write to the file. These were my thoughts from just a few months ago. …

There are plenty of opportunities for friction in the user experience when logging in, particularly while entering a two-factor authentication code. As developers, we should be building applications that support the need for account security but don’t detract from the user experience. Sometimes, it can feel as though these requirements are in a battle against each other.

In this piece, we’ll look at the humble <input> element and the HTML attributes that’ll help speed up our users' two-factor authentication experience.

The Default Experience

When you implement two-factor authentication for a web application, perhaps with the Authy two-factor authentication API, you’ll need a form for your user to input the one-time password you’re going to send them. …

It happened! I’ve been waiting for the moment I needed to send a fax since Twilio launched the Programmable Fax API back in 2017 and this week it finally happened! I won’t go into detail about what I needed to send, but it’s safe to say the medical profession could consider their communication choices for the future.

I could have sent the fax by uploading a PDF to Twilio Assets and using the API explorer, but that wouldn’t have been as fun as over-engineering an entire application to send and track the fax to make sure it arrived and be prepared for any future fax situations. …

So you’ve decided to speak at a developer conference? You have a story you want to share with your peers-how you built something, how you learned something new, how you became a better developer and how everyone else can too-but you need to find a stage on which to share this story.

There are hundreds of developer conferences out there, covering everything you could think of in our industry. Knowing they are there is nice, but finding out which are coming up and are have an open call for proposals (CFP) is the challenge. …

Recently I’ve been refactoring the tests for a gem I maintain, and I needed to test that it sets the right cookies at the right time. But the cookies in use in the gem are signed cookies and that caused a slight hiccup for me. I’d never tested the value in a signed cookie before and it wasn’t immediately obvious what to do.

So I thought I would share what I found out in case it helps.

Cookies on Rails

In Rails applications there are three flavours of cookies available: simple session cookies, signed cookies and encrypted cookies. …

When your application sends emails it is useful to know what happens to those emails, like whether it has been delivered or opened. Or, sometimes more importantly, whether it bounced. The Twilio SendGrid email API doesn’t just send emails, it can also send you events via webhook that tell you what happened to your emails.

In this post we’ll build a small application using Ruby on Rails to send emails and update their status based on the Twilio SendGrid event webhooks.

What you’ll need

In order to build this application along with this post, you will need:

• Ruby and Bundler installed
• ngrok — my favourite way to tunnel webhooks to my local…

We’ve seen a video chat built with React on the Twilio blog before but since then, in version 16.8, React released Hooks. Hooks let you use state or other React features inside functional components instead of writing a class component.

In this post, we are going to build a video chat application using Twilio Video and React with only functional components, using the useState, useCallback, useEffect, and useRef Hooks.

What You’ll Need

To build this video chat application, you will need the following:

• Node.js and npm installed.
• A Twilio account (sign up for a free Twilio account here).

Once you’ve got all that, we can prepare our development environment. …