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Send voice notes to a phone number or group

The Sendblue API allows you to send Apple voice notes to iMessage recipients or groups. The Apple voice note is a .caf file that is sent as the media_url. The recipient will receive a playable voice note inline in their iMessage thread, which looks the same as if you had sent them a voice note by holding down the microphone within iMessage.

Usage​

To send a voice note to a recipient, you must first upload the voice note to a public storage bucket so that it can be downloaded by Sendblue. Be sure that you are uploading a .caf (Core audio file) file, as this is the only format that Apple supports for inline voice notes.

Here's what that looks like as a curl request:

curl --location --request POST 'https://api.sendblue.co/api/send-message' \
--header 'sb-api-key-id: YOUR_SB_API_KEY_ID' \
--header 'sb-api-secret-key: YOUR_SB_API_SECRET_KEY' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data-raw '{
    "number": "+19998887777",
    "media_url": "https://storage.googleapis.com/inbound-file-store/AudioMessage.caf",
    "status_callback": "https://example.com/message-status/1234abcd"
}'

And here's the same in Node.js with Axios

const axios = require("axios");

const url = `https://api.sendblue.co/api/send-message`;

axios.post(
  url,
  {
    number: "+19998887777",
    media_url:
      "https://storage.googleapis.com/inbound-file-store/AudioMessage.caf",
    status_callback: "https://example.com/message-status/1234abcd",
  },
  {
    headers: {
      "sb-api-key-id": "YOUR_SB_API_KEY_ID",
      "sb-api-secret-key": "YOUR_SB_API_SECRET_KEY",
      "content-type": "application/json",
    },
  }
);

Response​

The response will be the same as a regular outbound message. The only difference is that the media_url will be the URL of the voice note you uploaded.

Troubleshooting​

Often times, it is desireable to convert the audio file from another format, such as MP3. This can be done using the ffmpeg library, and requires the codec to be set as opus or libopus Here's an example of how to convert an MP3 file to a .caf file:

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -acodec opus -b:a 24k output.caf