Introduction

Plivo provides simple and easy-to-use Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to make and receive calls, send SMSes, make a conference call, and more. These APIs are used in conjunction with XML responses to control the flow of a call or a message. You can create Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) endpoints to perform the telephony operations and the APIs are platform independent and can be applied to any environment such as PHP, Ruby, JSON etc.

Overview

If you are a developer looking to build a web application to perform telephony operations, start by taking a look at the API and XML documentation, and the sample code. Plivo also provides helper libraries in various languages such as PHP, Python, Ruby, and Java.

• APIs - Plivo's APIs provide functions that enable your web application to perform telephony operations such as Outbound Calling, Fetching Number List, Checking Account Details etc. You can also do some nifty things like Transfer an Existing Call, Send Group SMSes, Forward Calls to different telephone numbers etc. Plivo uses REST programming techniques to implement its APIs.

  See the API Documentation to learn about the available APIs.

• XML - Your application can use a combination of Plivo XML and APIs to build a set of telephony operations. When your web application interfaces with Plivo, in many instances, it is expected to send an XML response back to Plivo. Plivo has defined a set of XML elements that the application must use to control the progress of the operation.

  See the XML Documentation to learn how to form and return an XML response.

• Helper Libraries - The helper libraries simplify the process of interacting with Plivo. All libraries are open sourced and are hosted on Github.

  View the helper libraries section for more information.

• Terminology - Check out our terminology section for an explanation of some of the terms used in the Plivo documentation.