Twilio Changelog

With Flex Conversations, agents can now seamlessly transfer messages to another agent or to a queue, with the option to add notes for extra context during the transfer.

Flex Insights (Historical Reporting) also now offers key transfer-related metrics like Total Transfers, Successful Transfers, Failed Transfers and Transfer Segments. These power a new out-of-the-box report on Messaging transfers.

The Conversation Transfer plugin remains available in the Plugin Library. You can choose between using the native Messaging transfers functionality with historical reporting or continuing to use the plugin, if it meets your needs.

For more information, see the Messaging transfers (Public Beta) documentation.

We are excited to announce that Flex UI 2.9.0 is now available. This release features the following additions and updates:

• We have certified that Flex UI works on Chromebooks, expanding your device options. 

• In Unified Profiles, your agents can now view customer interactions history information before any of your customer data sources are connected, immediately enabling them to provide more customized, efficient service.

Throughout Flex UI, you'll find a broad range of feature and UI enhancements, bug fixes, and more. 

For complete details, see the Flex UI release notes for 2.9.0.

We roll out releases gradually over the span of a few weeks. If you have automatic Flex UI updates enabled, you can now opt in to have new minor releases applied to your Flex instance as soon as they’re available. We recommend this on accounts used for development or testing purposes to explore new features right away.

We are excited to announce that Flex UI 2.8.0 is now available. This release features the following additions and updates:

• Additional language support for Agent Copilot, so you can now generate wrap-up notes for Spanish and Portuguese conversations. 

• In Unified Profiles, we’ve added:

  • Customer highlights for outbound conversations

  • The ability for agents to manually refresh a customer’s profile history

  • Improved configurability for the profile header and recent activity

  • Enhanced container capabilities which allow your agent experiences to benefit from existing Flex programmability features

  • When a task comes in and a profile is associated with the customer’s email address, the customer’s name now appears in the task

• Flex on Citrix VDI now supports remote devices running ChromeOS, including Chromebooks.

• Updated the Voice SDK to version 2.11.1.

• Updated the behavior of the Flex UI API Reference version selector so that broken links redirect to the newest documentation for the selected version instead of showing an error message.

You'll also notice a number of feature and UI enhancements, bug fixes, and more.

For complete details, see the Flex UI release notes for 2.8.0.

We're excited to announce that the Update Profile Traits Widget is in Private Beta. Use this widget to take information you learn about a caller during a flow execution and send it to Unified Profiles to update profile trait data. This allows you to enrich profiles to personalize future customer experiences based on their profile traits. 

Visit the Update Profile Traits Widget docs to learn more.

TaskRouter now enables you to route tasks directly to a specific worker or task queue. This can be helpful when: 

• A customer only wants to speak to one specific worker.

• A customer sends an email with a technical question the worker who received it is unable to answer. However, the worker knows a specific worker or task queue who can help that customer. 

• You need to route tasks based on additional criteria beyond what is supported in TaskRouter’s workflows. For example, this can be helpful when you want to check task queue depth and route to a different task queue based on wait times.

To route a task to a person, task queue, or workflow, specify the worker, task queue, or workflow in the RoutingTarget parameter. 

If you want to make sure that you don’t route a task to a worker who doesn’t currently have capacity, set the new IgnoreCapacity parameter to false. This parameter only applies when routing a task to a worker; it does not apply when routing to a task queue or workflow. 

By default, the IgnoreCapacity parameter is set to true when routing to a worker, meaning that the worker will receive the task even if they don’t have capacity. For example, a customer who calls to speak to a specific worker can be routed to that person and leave a voicemail if they’re not available, rather than be routed to a different worker.

For more information about routing tasks, see our Task Resource documentation.

TaskRouter routes tasks in priority order, starting with the highest priority. If multiple tasks have the same priority, it uses the task creation time to break the tie, sorting tasks from oldest to newest so that the oldest task is routed first. 

However, in some scenarios, the task creation time doesn't reflect the actual date and time that the customer interaction originally began, and the task is sorted lower than it should be. For example:

• A customer calls, waits for 20 minutes, and is offered a callback. The customer hangs up and a new task is created for the callback. The 20 minutes that the customer waited during the first call are not captured in the task creation time for the new task.

• A customer begins a conversation in one channel, such as chat, and switches to a different channel, such as a voice call. Moving to another channel creates a new task with a later task creation time, so the new task is prioritized lower.

To correct how these types of tasks are prioritized, you can now specify a "virtual start time," which is an optional parameter. When specified, virtual start time is used in place of the task creation time to determine where the task is sorted in the list. 

For example, if we added a virtual start time to the second task that was created in the callback example above, we could set it to match the time that the original task was created. That would enable the customer to keep their place in line for a callback.

For more information, see our documentation:

• Queue Ordering for a more detailed description of how virtual start time works, including examples

• VirtualStartTime on the Task Resource page for information about how to use this parameter

When using the Set Variables widget and Run Subflow widget, parameters are (by default) parsed as strings. Use the `parse as JSON object` option when you know a parameter will be a JSON object. This will allow the variable to be properly interpreted as a JSON object so you can reference its attributes within the Studio flow. 

The `parse as JSON object` option allows you to:

• Set or pass an existing JSON object and reference its members as variables.

• Set a literal JSON string (Liquid reference to a JSON string, or a mixture of JSON and Liquid) and access it as an object. 

The Flex Plugins CLI can now help validate your plugins against the latest Flex UI version to ensure compatibility. The recommendations displayed by this command help you follow best practices to keep your plugin code compatible with Flex UI as the platform evolves. However, it cannot guarantee compatibility. This command also runs implicitly as part of the Deploy command.

The 7.0.0 release also includes:

• Enhancements to the CLI version update notifier 

• Integrated telemetry for all of the commands

• Security fixes

• Removal of unused dependencies

This update includes two breaking changes:

• Because the twilio:flex:plugins:deploy command now validates plugins as part of the deployment process, version 7.0.0 and later can disrupt automated deployments, such CI/CD pipelines. When the Deploy command runs, if the validation process finds any errors, the deployment process stops to ask for input. To prevent this issue, use the --bypass-validation option on your Deploy command to skip plugin validation for automated deployments. For details, see Deploy in the Flex Plugins CLI reference.
• Node v14 is no longer supported. Your plugins must be compatible with Node v16.x or later.

For more information about this release, see the Flex Plugins CLI release notes. For complete information about the Flex Plugins CLI, see our Flex Plugins CLI documentation.

You can now select permissions for TaskRouter APIs while creating a Restricted API Key on Console. The product already supports permissions for Studio, Voice, SIP, Messages, Regulatory Compliance and Long Codes APIs.

Restricted API Keys allow you to decide which Twilio API Resources an API Key can access, and which action(s) the API Key is allowed to take on those API Resources.