SMS integration reference

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Add action commands to the message context object to manage the flow of conversations with customers who interact with your assistant by submitting SMS messages over the telephone.

This feature is currently not available in the AI assistant builder of IBM watsonx Orchestrate.

Learn about the supported commands and reserved context variables that are used by the SMS integration.

Supported commands

Each action consists of a command property, followed by an optional parameter property to define parameters for commands that require them. The commands that are described in the following table are supported by the SMS integration.

Table 1. Table 1. Actions that you can initiate from the action
Action command	Description	Parameters
`terminateSession`	Ends the current SMS session. Use this command to ensure that the subsequent text message starts a new assistant-level session which does not retain any context values from the current session.	None
`smsActSendMedia`	Enables MMS messaging.	`mediaURL`: Specifies a JSON array of publicly accessible media URLs that are sent to the user.
`smsActSetDisambiguationConfig`	Configures how to handle the choices that are displayed in a disambiguation list.	`prefixText`: Text to include before each option. For example, `Press %s for` where `%s` represents the number corresponding to a list choice; this is replaced with the actual number at run time.
`smsActSetOptionsConfig`	Configures how to handle option response types.	`prefixText`: Text to include before each option. For example, `Press %s for` where `%s` represents the number corresponding to a list choice; this is replaced with the actual number at run time.

Reserved context variables

The following table describes the context variables that have special meaning in the context of the SMS integration. They should not be used for any purpose other than the documented use.

Table 2 describes the context variables that are set by your action. Table 3 describes the context variables that you can set by the SMS integration.

Table 2. Context variables that are set by your action

Table 2. Table 2. SMS context variables set by the action
Context variable name	Expected value	Description
`smsConversationResponseTimeout`	Time in ms	The amount of time in milliseconds that the integration waits to receive a response from the action. If the time limit is exceeded, the integration attempts to contact the action again. If the service still can't be reached, the SMS response fails.

Table 3. Context variables that are set by the integration

Table 3. Table 3. SMS context variables set by the integration
Context variable name	Description
`smsTenantPhoneNumber`	The integration tenant phone number that the user is messaging.
`smsUserPhoneNumber`	The phone number of the user that is exchanging messages with the integration.
`smsUserData`	Data in JSON format to be passed verbatim to the service orchestration engine or AI assistant builder service. This variable is sent only if the session is started from the integration tenant and the data is sent through the REST API.
`smsSessionTimeoutCount`	The session timeout value. This variable is sent only if the timeout value is defined through the REST API.
`smsError`	When the integration fails to send an SMS message, this variable contains details about the error that occurred.
`smsSessionID`	The globally unique identifier (GUID) for the related SMS Gateway session.
`smsMedia`	The `arraylist` of `mediaURL` and corresponding `mediaContentType`. This context variable is cleared at the end of each conversation turn.