• A Conversational AI platform to build intelligent communication experiences.
• Autopilot now supports Google Assistant.
• Available now in beta.

Since we launched Autopilot at Signal last month, we’ve been working on expanding its features set. Today, we’re excited to share that Autopilot now supports Google Assistant — one of the leading channels for voice assistants.

Google Assistant is quickly becoming omnipresent through Android phones, wearables, and smart home devices. Google Assistant shows that customer experiences are being designed to create conversation style interactions. Try asking Google Assistant who the president is — then ask “who is his wife”. Google carries the context forward creating a great experience. Smart speaker owners now have on average 2.2 devices and smart speaker installed base has risen to 57.8 million and with this new addition to Autopilot channels, brands can reach a larger volume of users.

An AI-powered virtual assistant built using Autopilot can handle …

• Conversational AI platform to build intelligent bots, IVRs, and Alexa apps.
• Available now in beta.
• Get started with Twilio Autopilot today.

There’s a huge gap between the promise and reality of bots. Bots tend to get stuck in loops and fail to achieve the task at hand. If they do manage to break out of the loop and handoff to agents, they often lose the context of data collected to that point.

Today, developers have to choose between software-as-a-service bot builders focused on particular use cases with limited customizability or, natural language understanding services that are essential but not sufficient to build a complete conversational flow.

Today, we're announcing Twilio Autopilot — a conversational AI platform to build intelligent bots, IVRs, and Alexa apps that work.

Twilio Autopilot is made up of three building blocks:

1. A Natural Language Understanding engine that analyzes user intent.
2. A Conversational Application …

• Studio, Twilio’s visual development environment is now Generally Available.
• New pricing — Studio for every communication use case.
• More messaging channels — Build chatbots for Facebook Messenger, LINE, WhatsApp, and many more.
• Flow Editor For Flex— Studio is integrated with Twilio Flex, a programmable contact center and supports TaskRouter-based applications.

At Twilio, we understand developers because we are developers. And we know that while you rock at writing code, you’d probably much rather write the code that counts than spend time on server maintenance, complex state management and dealing with scale issues as your use cases grow. That’s why we developed Twilio Studio — a visual development environment that makes it easier than ever to create and deploy new customer experiences using messaging and voice in no time.

Today we are moving Twilio Studio into General Availability

On the ramp from beta to GA, we made some significant …

Welcome to our second post in the mini-series on getting started with SMS chatbots! Today you’ll learn some of the basics of building a bot while working in a friendly, no code required, visual builder called Twilio Studio.

Today’s tutorial shows how to build a New Year’s Resolution Bot that will help users commit to their New Year’s resolution and stay on track. To make a New Year’s resolution truly official, the Resolution Bot will get users to sign a contract. A contract requires:

Name of the individual committing to the resolution.

The resolution itself.

A completion date to achieve it by.

A signature to make it official. 

🎗      Reminders to ensure Resolution Success!

But first, let m …

• Create conversations between customers and your mobile workers without revealing personal phone numbers.
• Proxy API handles phone number management, session control, and bridging between calls and texts so you don’t have to.  
• Now available in beta.
• Get started with Twilio Proxy today.

Remember the days before ridesharing apps? If you needed to go to the airport, you would call a taxicab company and speak with a dispatch agent. Today, there’s no need to call a dispatcher to order a cab, then call again to get ETA updates, or give directions—all of this communication is done using the app. What a concept! Now that we’ve experienced this luxury, it’s hard to go back to life before it. 

However, this experience wasn’t built overnight. Companies had to figure out ways to solve a few challenges. For example:

• How do you make a phone call between two individuals programmatically?
• How do you make …

• Bulk SMS through a single API request.
• Make marketing announcements, send emergency response notifications.
• Available in beta.

We are excited to announce Passthrough API—an addition to the Notify API that simplifies the way developers can build bulk SMS in their applications.

In the past, if developers needed to notify many users, they’d have to do so by making a unique API request per recipient from their list of user addresses. If this list was too long, making API requests would consume too much time.

Now, businesses can send bulk SMS notifications with a single API request via Twilio Notify. What’s even better is that it can be used not just for SMS, but for all the other channels …