SMS messaging in 2023

Configuration
1

I am in the US and I recently came across a need to use SMS to push occasional notifications to friends and family members who do not have the companion app or discord installed.

I found that Twilio and Clicksend are now pretty much a no-go. From what I gather, laws have changed and the companies are now only catering to business oriented uses. When attempting to sign up for clicksend just now, their rules literally said:

No personal messaging (commercial/business messaging only)

I tried to setup Twilio yesterday and I literally need to fill out a verification application with the name a business and have it approved before I can even send a single message!

I saw someone discussing a tasker automation to fire SMS messages upon receiving an email witha keyword, but that seems chunky to me, would really like something more graceful.

Ideally we would see a way to get the companion app to send SMS on our behalf, but in lieu of this, does anyone have a good solution for sending SMS in 2023?

2 Likes
2

The Twilio thing is pretty difficult. Eventually I worked through the process - it took several weeks and cost $14. But now the SMS come through reliably.

In parallel I started using Telegram. Telegram works great, was easy to setup and also give you the potential to send commands back to HA to run an automation, etc.

I plan to drop Twillio once my account goes to zero.

1 Like
3

I use Llamalab Automate. The HA integration allows me to send a notification to an Android tablet running the companion app (one of the wall tablets I use for HA dashboards). That tablet also has the Automate app running, which converts the notification into a SMS message and sends it.

4

I’m honestly pretty surprised there’s not a Google voice integration yet… I looked and couldn’t find one, but maybe somebody has written something?

5

I would also follow @Stiltjack’s approach, convert incoming notifications via tasker/Automate app into SMS.

6

Can we do that with a android docker image?

7

In case still surrounded by 2G you can build a cheap SMS gateway with a esp and a sim800l module :point_down:

(Your provider also needs to support 2G!)

8

nowadays, you have only 4G.
Do you know the cheapest option for 4G (dongle)?

9

not quite correct :point_down: (my provider still provides 2G in quite some part of the world) :earth_africa:

image
image1156Ă—570 108 KB

2G is mostly even more widely available then 3G - still both get phased out slowly to get so more bands free for 4G+ :signal_strength:

10

but that will change soon (next year): What Europe’s 2G and 3G network shutdown means for vibration monitoring instrumentation - SYSCOM.

image

11

:point_down:

For example Luxembourg, Belgium, Spain, Romania, Slovakia or Poland will have 2G for (still) more than 5 years while 3G will be already gone in 2 years time in this countries…

12

sorry I live in :switzerland: and does not look good for the most populated countries.
So when you brick it down to populate, and thus to user to user base 4G is quite important

13

So you might not say :speak_no_evil:

but instead :point_down:

nowadays, we in switzerland :switzerland: only have 4G :bulb:

Which btw. doesn’t look to be quite correct as 3G is still operational and first 5G sunrise(d) already in 2018 :sunrise:

14

2G is still alive as a lot of IoT is running on 2G I know AT&T shut down 2G but that created a lot of trouble for millions of people

15

Don’t forget that many carriers provide an SMS gateway email domain like [email protected]

See the last paragraph in this document for the Verizon example. Google for your own specific carrier.

Once you have the right email address you can just use the SMTP integration or Gmail integration to send the email.

1 Like
16

Hi @Stilljack. Just wondering if you could give me an idea how to convert the notification to an SMS? I have automate and it cannot seem to extract the email I send to an SMS :frowning:

17

The notify service is set up in configuration.yaml:

notify:
  - platform: llamalab_automate
    name: tablet
    api_key: !secret llamalab
    to: !secret nedc
    device: "SAMSUNG SM-T505"

The notification is sent with:

service: notify.tablet
data:
  message: >-
    {{ as_timestamp(now()) | timestamp_custom('%I:%M%p', true) }}: Reminder - {{
    trigger.calendar_event.summary }} tomorrow.
  data:
    priority: normal
    device: SAMSUNG SM-T505

And this is the Automate flow on the tablet (if you can read it…)

image
image259Ă—618 15.1 KB