Announcing Voice Insights for Carrier Calls

Announcing Voice Insights for Carrier Calls

• Monitor call quality of the carrier leg of Twilio calls.
• Pricing starts at $0.0025/min. Volume discounts available.
• Now available in public beta.

Last fall, we introduced Voice Insights to help you monitor the quality of WebRTC calls in your Twilio Client-powered apps. With real-time metrics on WebRTC calls, issues that once took days of back-and-forth with your customers and ISPs can now be diagnosed in seconds with real-time data.

Today we’re excited to announce that Voice Insights now provides analytics for calls on carrier networks all around the world. By enabling Voice Insights for both WebRTC and carrier calls, you’ll get real-time network metrics, SIP events, phone number type, and the end user’s carrier information for all calls connecting to Twilio.

Call quality can be tough to nail down. Issues can originate from the handset, from the last mile link between the cell phone and the tower, from your user’s carrier network, or even from Twilio’s network. Figuring out the root cause of a problem gets even harder when users connect from all over the world. Global carrier networks don’t offer uniform and perfect coverage – not to mention network congestion, spotty coverage, improper handoffs, and a myriad of other issues that can happen in carrier networks.

When your customer could be driving through a tunnel or attempting to reach a phone number that’s out of service, it can be hard to isolate the root cause of call quality problems.

These are all cases where you have had no visibility into call quality in the past, making it hard to know exactly what went wrong on the call. With Voice Insights for Carriers, we are enabling end-to-end call quality monitoring to help rapidly diagnose obscure issues affecting call quality.   

Voice Insights for Carrier Calls

Overview

With Voice Insights, network metrics, telephony events, and end-users’ carrier information is available for all calls connecting to Twilio. The network metrics are broken out by incoming and outgoing streams for each user’s connection. This way, you can pinpoint quality problems to the carrier network, Twilio, or even a specific phone number.

Get visibility into telephony events & network metrics

For every call that connects to Twilio, you can visualize jitter, packet loss, and packets sent and received, even while the call is in progress. Real-time telephony events provide information on call progress so you can see where calls failed to connect, were initiated but didn’t ring, or were not answered.

Measure connect time and know who hung up the call

Knowing if a customer hung up when they were transferred or placed on hold is vital to improving the customer experience. This information can help you measure disconnect methods, as well as categorize and fix problems with your call flow.

Post-dial-delay is another important metric, giving you insight into how long it takes for a customer to reach you from the point they initiate the call. High connect times usually mean unhappy customers.

Categorize call quality issues by your user’s carriers (coming soon)

Sometimes even when network metrics are okay, call quality can be poor. For instance, there may be an issue at the last mile, between the cell phone and the carrier. Knowing whether network degradation is happening at a carrier level, where calls to and from users on the same carrier network are failing, helps contain the issue. In an upcoming release of Voice Insights for carrier calls, we will offer aggregate dashboards that show call quality metrics grouped by your customers’ mobile operators.

Analyze quality by specific phone numbers, countries, and area codes (coming soon)

When you identify issues, it’s important to drill down from the global carrier view into the set of calls that were affected, and then down to the specific phone number. The upcoming update to Voice Insights will provide just that, offering call quality by country, area code, phone number type, and phone number.

Know your users’ call experience with Audio Trace (developer preview)

With Audio Trace, you can learn first-hand how your users experienced the call by visualizing and playing back the call audio waveform. Audio Trace helps you uncover obscure issues when the network metrics appear perfect, but your customers experienced deteriorated call quality. You can request early access to Audio Trace.

Getting Started With Voice Insights

You can switch on Voice Insights for Twilio Client or Carrier Calls using the Insights settings in Twilio Console. Voice Insights for Carrier Calls starts at $0.0025/min. Below are some resources to help you get started:

• Voice Insights in Console
• Detailed documentation
• Information on volume pricing

We can’t wait to see what you build.