We’re going to start by getting a number that we can use for our receptionist. There are two ways to get numbers compatible with Vocode:

1. Linking your own telephony provider via BYO Telephony.
2. Purchasing a number directly via Vocode telephony.

If you’re on the Free plan, you’ll have to upgrade your account in order to either purchase numbers via Vocode telephony or to link your own Twilio account via BYO Telephony.

​

Linking your own Twilio numbers

You can link your own telephony account once you’ve upgraded your plan by following the documentation in BYO Telephony. We’ll quickly walk through the steps here for adding your own Twilio account.

First, we’re going to link our Twilio account via Account Connections.

account_connection = vocode_client.account_connections.create_account_connection(
    request={
        "type": "account_connection_twilio",
        "credentials": {
            "twilio_account_sid": os.getenv("TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID"),
            "twilio_auth_token": os.getenv("TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN"),
        },
    }
)

Now, once we have a phone number from our Twilio account, we can link it to Vocode using the link number functionality.

number_to_link = "1123456789"
print(
    vocode_client.numbers.link_number(
        phone_number=number_to_link,
        telephony_account_connection=account_connection_id,
    )
)

​

Buying a number

You can use the numbers/buy endpoint to purchase numbers via Vocode telephony or via your own account connection. Here, we purchase one using Vocode telephony.

phone_number = vocode_client.numbers.buy_number(BuyPhoneNumberRequest(area_code="415", telephony_provider="twilio"))

You can specify which telephony provider you want to use, the current supported options are: twilio and vonage.

You’ll get a response that looks like:

{
  "id": "***",
  "user_id": "***",
  "number": "11234567890",
  "inbound_agent": {...},
  "telephony_provider": "twilio",
  "telephony_account_connection": null,
  ...
}

Your phone number is now active! Let’s start configuring the number to work as our receptionist.