Copilot Just Got Even Smarter: Announcing Smart Encoding

Time to read: 2 minutes

May 10, 2017

Written by

Justin Pirie

Twilion

Copilot Just Got Even Smarter: Announcing Smart Encoding

Prevent messages from being unnecessarily concatenated
Automatic translation of Unicode to equivalent GSM7/ASCII characters
Available now

In the past, the only way to check whether a message contained an inadvertent Unicode character was to paste the text into a tool that tells you how we will encode your message or send a test message and check for segments in your logs, which adds an extra step to your development lifecycle.

Now with the new Smart Encoding feature for Copilot, Twilio will automatically translate Unicode characters into GSM7/ASCII characters for you if there are GSM7/ASCII alternatives and no characters that can’t be converted in the message, e.g. emoji or language based characters.

Imagine you spent all night crafting the perfect 159 character message. Your CEO loves it. You copy and paste it from Google docs into your IDE and send 1000 messages.

You log into the Twilio Console to see your message queue decrease as your messages are being delivered. Next, you check the logs to view the delivery steps and encoding for individual messages when, lo and behold, you discover that your messages are being sent in two segments. 😭

You ask yourself: Why is my message being concatenated into two segments and costing me the price of two messages?

This is because when a message contains even a single Unicode character, it gets segmented at 70 characters instead of the normal 160 characters. Often these characters – a smart quote ( 〞), a long dash (—), or a Unicode whitespace – slip in and are hard to identify as the cause of your message being split up.

Smart Encoding for Copilot is available now and is enabled by default for all new Messaging Services.

If you have existing Messaging Services, you’ll need to enable them for Smart Encoding. Simply log in to the console and navigate to your Messaging Services to enable it.