I’m traveling to an area of the world where the only communication medium I will have available to me is unlimited 140 character text messages. I’m wondering if it is possible to set up a computer that will allow me to fully interact with it via SMS. I’d like to be able to do things like check the news, read and reply to my emails, check on the status of my home and other servers. What is the state of the art in SMS based human computer interaction?
Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
1–10 of 122 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#2not aware of anything universal. There are SMS-based services for lots of things, but less in the context of "UI for my own things".
in lots of ways, it's console UI with additional length limits I guess? Or chatbot-UI.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#3Which part of the world?
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#4there was http://cel.ly, they are no longer available.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#5SMS No-Code Tools
A ssh-through-sms tunnel would be fun
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#6you might have an easier time splitting up send and receive into separate managed things instead of looking for one system to do it all over SMS
_SEND_
You can send an email over SMS I believe by texting the email address.
So you should be able to set up a server to process emails you send to a specific address and trigger commands in response to it. the triggers would need to be set up in advance, but other than that you should be able to do anything normal
_RECEIVE_
For receiving SMS - I am not sure tbh. You could use Twilio, but it might be overkill. I would jsut make sure whatever solution you use doesn't get automatically blocked by the ISP. I am not sure the proper way to flag something as wanted / intended
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#7Which part of the world?
Alaska. It is possible to get LEO phone / data, but it is more cost prohibitive. Unlimited SMS plans on LEO satellite services are relatively cheap.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#8The main issue with SMS is that it's unencrypted and often intentionally being piped to third party firms for advertising and whatnot, so whatever you do it probably isn't advisable to send anything you wouldn't want people seeing (eg. I wouldn't suggest doing email via it). If you have even the smallest data cap, https://lite.cnn.com can be used for your news and https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/h/ (/h/ at the end) will load the mostly pure HTML version of Gmail, or even just imap (without automated push/pull) is pretty lightweight on data usage.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#9Depending on how important this is to you there is always the option of getting yourself a VOIP number and a softphone on one of your computers and hooking a small script into it to do whatever things you want to acchieve.
Never done anything like this but I imagine that it might not be too hard since the infrastructure is pretty much there already. However building a "protocol" on top of SMS might be somewhat tricky. You might want to write an APP or something for that.
As for "fire and forget" solutions ... Well, there are email to SMS gateways if i remember correctly.
Re: Ask HN: Is there a pure SMS based UI?
#10There’s always these guys, who made quite a splash on this here message board: