twilio conference - get dialedin participants phone input

Question

All the participants to my twilio conference are muted except the presenter. I need to implement a feature where the dialed in participant wants to ask a question by dialing a key on his phone.

Essentially a 'raise hand' feature. He can then be unmuted by the moderator and allowed to ask his question.

I already have a build in dashboard to mute/unmute the participants.

is there a way that the caller can hit *1 or some combination of keys that I can then use in my callback.

I've tried using * with hanguponstar functionality but it basically exits the caller from the conference.

Thanks, Amit

Answer 1

Twilio developer evangelist here.

If you use hangupOnStar and add further TwiML after the <Dial> then the call will continue for the user. So, you could do something like:

<Response>
  <Dial hangupOnStar="true">
    <Conference>MyConferenceRoom</Conference>
  </Dial>
  <Redirect>/handUp</Redirect>
</Response>

You would redirect the caller through a /handup action. In this action you could register the caller's question and respond with TwiML to dial them back into the <Conference>.

Note, if you have an action attribute for your <Dial> then the call will follow that rather than carry on with the TwiML in the original action.

Let me know if that helps at all.