For emergencies requiring prompt attention, Ubidots Events Engine allows you to trigger live voice call notifications. Additionaly, you can also trigger text message notifications by using the SMS action.

Here's how you can set either of these actions up in a few steps.

To begin, head to the “data” tab →"Events" and hover over the “+” button, located at the upper right corner of the screen, and create a conditional event, global event, or scheduled event depending on your needs.

Next, configure the event’s triggers with an AND/OR logic. For additional details on how to configure these triggers, head to their corresponding guides: value based, inactivity, geofence.

With the "trigger" logic configured, it’s now time to set up the voice call action.

1. Click on the “+ add action” button. From the available options, select “make voice call”.

2. Assign the correct country code and phone number(s) for dialing.

3. Customize the “active trigger” and the “back to normal” (optional) texts to be delivered to the receiving phone number(s).

By using the tag icon at the upper right corners of the “subject” and “message” fields you can easily add information such as device ID, timestamp, variable name, etc.

Note: By default, data inputs involving timestamps are sent in human-readable format (YYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss TZ). If you'd rather attach UNIX epoch time in milliseconds, double-click on the data input and delete the text from the pipe symbol ("|") until the end, as shown below.

4. Select a voice: Alice (female) or John (male).

5. Choose the voice language (English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and many more are available).

6. Optionally, enable the “repeat action” if you want to repeat the action multiple times while the event is triggered. You can choose how often and up to how many times the action will be repeated. There’s a limit of 50 action repetitions.

7. Click on “save” once you finish configuring the action and on “next”, unless you want to set up multiple actions.

8. After completing the action configuration you’ll proceed to the final step, the “settings” tab. There, you’ll name the event and give it a description (optional).

9. Another optional step is to use a tag on the event. This is a great tool to control what your end users see in your app. In this case, for instance, you could decide that your end user sees one event, but not another, using tags. Learn more about tags here.

10. Finally (unless the event you created is a scheduled event), determine the activity window in which the events should be executed. An event can have multiple active windows by clicking on the “+ add window button” and configuring them correspondingly. After finishing this, click on “save” and your event will be deployed.

Voice calling notifications from Ubidots are billed based on this pricing schedule.

The SMS action is a good alternative to the Voice call action that works similarly. This action allows you to have SMS being sent out to selected numbers when the event gets triggered. To set it up, follow these steps:

1. After configuring the "trigger" logic, click on the “+ add action” button. From the available options, select “send SMS”.

2. Assign the correct country code and phone number(s).

3. Customize the “active trigger” and the “back to normal” (optional) text to be delivered to the receiving phone number(s).

4. Click on “save” once you finish configuring the action and on “next”, unless you want to set up multiple actions.

IMPORTANT NOTE: SMS alerts support up to 140 characters. If exceeded, the message body will be trimmed to this length.