The SitePoint PHP blog has a new tutorial posted by author Christopher Thomas showing you how, with the help of Twilio, create a Laravel-based application that lets users communicate with it via phone calls.

Twilio is a SaaS application which enables developers to build telephone applications using web technologies. In this two-part series, we will leverage Twilio to build a weather forecast app that is accessed using the telephone system. The backend will be written with the Laravel framework (an exploratory video course is available for purchase here, or in the form of written tutorials here).

In this part, we will create a simple program that will allow a user to call a phone number that we buy from Twilio, enter a zipcode, and receive the current weather forecast.

You'll need to have a Laravel project already set up and a development environment to work in as well as Composer installed versions of Guzzle and the Twilio SDK. With that all set up, he dives right into the code, setting up routes and creating the "Weather" service class. This class is what's used to interact with the Twilio API and respond to user prompts with weather data from the weather.gov API. Next up is the controller that provides the endpoints for Twilio to hit and return the weather data back to their waiting connection. A bit of middleware is set up to sent the Twilio request signature each time and instructions are included on how to test the local system with the public Twilio API (using Ngrok).