All Stories from SIGNAL 2017

All Stories from SIGNAL 2017

Are you sitting down? Alright, good. Post-SIGNAL, your head is likely spinning from the whirlwind of announcements. Never fear, we’ve got the rundown for you.

No two developer tool belts are alike. There are 1.6 million of your fellow developers on the Twilio platform. Each of them—including you—is building something to solve a nuanced problem, with a nuanced set of tools. SIGNAL just put your tool belt at full capacity.

With that primer, let’s dive into all 42 stories from SIGNAL, starting with the headliners:

• Proxy (developer preview)
• Channels (developer preview)
• Phone numbers (beta)
• New Add-ons for TaskRouter (beta)
• Speech Recognition (beta)
• Understand (coming soon)
• Functions (beta)
• Frame (coming soon)
• Voice Insights for Carrier Calls (beta)
• Wireless Global Connectivity (developer preview)

The Comprehensive List

Programmable Communications Cloud  |  Twilio™ Engagement Cloud
Super Network  | Runtime  |  Marketplace

Programmable Communications Cloud

To build products you need the right building blocks. Twilio’s Programmable Communications Cloud is comprised of the core building blocks you rely on—Programmable Voice, SMS, Chat, Video, and Fax.

1. A new Speech Recognition feature for Programmable Voice turns speech into text in real-time. It works at the speed of your voice, giving you searchable logs of your conversation and creating records and data out of thin air.
2. Soon you’ll be able to unleash Twilio Understand to turn freeform text into data so you can analyze sentiment and iterate.
3. Twilio Frame (coming soon) will give developers the UI components and tools they need to build chat, voice, and video apps. It’ll spare you the cycles of designing buttons and icons for your apps.
4. When you’re running your communications suite on PSTN, you need insight into how it’s performing in order to make critical decisions. Now there’s a way—meet Voice Insights for Carrier Calls.
5. Answering Machine Detection tells you if there’s a human or machine on the other end. You can sniff out those answering machines right now. Use AMD here.
6. *Sniffle.* They grow up so fast. Programmable Chat is now generally available.
7. Go fax yourself. Seriously—now there’s an API for that.
8. Video’s so hot right now, and so is our Programmable Video product, which just went GA.
9. Video Group Rooms let you handle up to 50 participants at a time on a single video call. It comes with a built-in audio and video recording feature.
10. Now using SMS Queue Insights, get visibility into any messages stuck in the cloud just waiting to be delivered.
11. Message Body Redaction (developer preview) stays true to its name—it removes the bodies, or content, of messages before they’re stored long term. This keeps customer data safe and secure.
12. Concatenation can be frustrating. You want your messages sent in the right order, in the right form. Not split up and out of order. Don’t worry, Smart Encoding for Copilot’s got you covered.

Engagement Cloud

Your customers won’t wait. They expect to be able to interact with your business at any time, on any medium, and we’re obsessed with making these interactions easier. We’ve observed that most communications built by businesses to engage with their customers fall into one of three categories—communication between systems, departments, or with specific individuals. So we shipped products to serve those distinct types of experiences. The Engagement Cloud consists of a collection of declarative APIs that do much of the heavy lifting of building custom experiences for you. They give you the logic needed for every type of customer interaction.

1. We announced Twilio Proxy—a declarative API that creates proxied one-on-one text and voice conversations between customers and the right worker in your company. Proxy is available now in public beta.
2. Contact centers rejoice! Now there are workforce management Add-ons for TaskRouter (developer preview).
3. Twilio Verification SDK for Android (developer preview) simplifies and automates phone number workflows in your Android apps.
4. Level up your notification game by going multi-channel. Twilio Notify is now available to everyone in public beta.
5. We added support for Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) for Notify.

Super Network

Everyday, you make calls, send messages, and push HTTP requests all over the world. Twilio’s Super Network is the infrastructure powering those connections. Whether you’re using phone numbers, short codes, SIP trunking, Wireless, Twilio Interconnect, or Lookup to communicate, you’re using one part of the Super Network ecosystem. Here’s what’s new with the Super Network.

1. We’ve just announced that we now have local phone numbers in over 70 countries, from France to Thailand to Brazil.
2. If you’re looking for toll-free numbers to use in those countries, we’ve got you covered. We’ve just increased our inventory of toll-free numbers with 27 new countries.
3. If you’re new to the cloud and trying to get that landline plugged into the Super Network, now there’s an easy way to do that—Hosted SMS. It lets you add SMS to any phone number, even landlines, without changing your existing voice provider.
4. Programmable Wireless has opened up access and is now available to everyone.
5. We’ve started testing global coverage for Programmable Wireless in almost 200 countries.
6. IoT Authentication Tools (coming soon) will make provisioning and trusting devices much simpler for developers.
7. We brought a new data center in Oregon online for Elastic SIP Trunking to improve audio fidelity and resiliency on the west coast of the United States.
8. We launched two new Interconnect exchanges in Europe and Asia.

Runtime

You can’t build what you need to without the right set of developer tools. Twilio Runtime is a virtual toolset you can use to develop Twilio apps faster and more easily.

1. We announced Twilio Functions to give you the ability to write and host code without having to push your code to a server—Twilio is that server. There’s no need to git push heroku master or ./ngrok http 8000 if you don’t want to. Simply write your code in the Functions portal, click “run” and your app is live.
2. Many Twilio applications require static assets, like mp3 files for <Play> or HTML/CSS/JS files for Video quickstart applications. Now using Assets, you can host those static files on Twilio and easily incorporate them into apps.
3. Debugger Webhook gives you the ability to receive an HTTP request from Twilio every time an application error occurs.
4. There’s a new version of our API Explorer, which is the quickest way to make real requests to Twilio’s REST API.
5. Our Sync product is now officially open in public beta and available for any developers who need to synchronize application state in the cloud.
6. Businesses can now control user authentication and user revocation with Single Sign-On (SSO)—part of the Twilio Enterprise Plan.
7. We launched Public Key Client Validation—say that 10 times fast.
8. Our API SLA for Enterprise Plan customers is now 99.99%.

Marketplace

Marketplace allows you to do more with less code. You can connect your business, customers, and your stack to a ton of third-party apps and pre-integrated partner technologies on the Twilio platform.

1. With Twilio Channels, you can now send and receive messages on multiple channels with the Twilio API you already use. We’re talking channels like Facebook Messenger, Slack, Twitter, Notifications for Alexa, and more (some Channels are in developer preview, some are coming soon).
2. Contact centers rejoice again! There are also analytics Add-ons for TaskRouter (developer preview).
3. We beefed up the Marketplace with a new OpenCNAM Add-on that gives you a caller’s name in real-time based on the phone number.
4. Now you can use the Deepgram Phrase Detector Add-on to locate keywords and phrases even in noisy, low-quality audio.
5. We introduced yet another Add-on optimized for call centers—VoiceBase PCI Detection and Redaction—for cleansing call recordings of sensitive data.
6. Marketing intelligence? There’s an Add-on for that and it’s called the Digital Segment Business Information Add-on.
7. Attention advertisers: if you run Facebook Lead Ads, now you can get notified when a new lead comes in. Using Facebook, Zapier, and Twilio together, you can turn new leads into buyers.
8. There’s a new IBM Watson Tone Analyzer Add-on that uses linguistic analysis to give you insights into the tone and emotions of your customers, so you can act accordingly.
9. We announced a partnership with Amazon that lets you integrate Twilio APIs into Amazon Connect’s contact flows to create intelligent, personalized experiences.

Whew. That was a doozy. SIGNAL is a moment built by, created for, and comprised of the Twilio community. Without you, there would be no suites, networks, or developer tool belts for us to build. We can’t thank you enough for coming to SIGNAL and being a member of the community. We’ll see you next year!