I use a cloud based scheduling software and I can tell it to text message a client an appointment reminder 24 hours before their appointment. How does the software actually send text messages?
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It’s not entirely clear what technology you are actually asking about. The texting? Cloud services? Scheduling? Because depending on the depth of the question, the answers can go from very complex to “It’s a timer”, so some more detail would be helpful.
If you’re asking how a computer sends a text to a phone
The software is connected to a system that has an assigned phone number. When you send a message, the software handles it the same way your phone sends a text using it’s assigned number. The recipients phone doesn’t know (or care) how the message originated.
With everything being IP, there’s not much difference between your smartphone and a “computer”.
* There are two main ways.
* The first is called an email-text gateway.
* Essentially all the major mobile carriers give their customers special email addresses.
* Anything sent to that address gets converted into a text message by the carrier.
* The second way is for the company running the app to also be a carrier.
* For example I have Google Fi.
* I can send text messages via an app on my computer.
* Google takes the messages I type into the app and then they send them out via their carrier network just the same as if I had composed the text on my phone.
These days, the companies who run phone networks (telecommunication carriers, aka “telcos” or “carriers”) run all their networks via computers. If you send an SMS from one phone to another, it’s likely already passing through multiple computers, so they can do things like collect logs for billing, queue messages for later delivery in case one phone is out of service, transfer messages to recipients on other carrier networks (eg. send it overseas via internet) etc.
These carriers might also provide a service that allows third parties to send SMS without using a phone, or connected to their cell network. Basically, one computer sends data to another computer run by the carrier – an SMS gateway – that will create the SMS message and push it out to the recipient phones. This generally costs money to use.
Some SMS gateways are used via web requests – like a REST API that many websites use today – others work by converting specific emails to SMS (eg. send an email to [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]), and the email body will be the text message).
There are also online services that act as a middleman, also confusingly calling themselves SMS Gateways. They deal with the various carriers across the world and their different gateways, figuring out which carrier to use based on the country and phone number, while providing a single unified service for end users and programmers to use with a simplified billing plan. This is likely what your cloud software is using on the server-side code.
They use [a texting service provider such as Bandwidth](https://www.bandwidth.com/messaging/). Bandwidth is basically a mobile carrier without towers and other cellular networking hardware. But they connect to other carriers exactly the same way a real mobile carrier does.
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