Twilio Releases: Q3 2020

With Flow publishing support built into the Studio REST API v2, you can now create, publish, and manage your Flows programmatically without having to log in to Twilio Console.

Flow definitions are exposed as JSON schemas and can be easily updated via the Twilio helper libraries and Twilio CLI.

With the new Flows endpoint you can

• Integrate Flow publishing into your CI/CD pipeline to automate Studio deployments
• Programmatically move Flows between accounts or subaccounts
• Create your own custom, branded Studio front-end UI 

The Studio REST API v2 is now available on all customer accounts.

To learn more, read the announcement on our blog or try the quickstart.

Twilio’s Evaluations API resource is in public beta so you can receive transparent feedback to understand the evaluation and failure reason(s) of your Regulatory Bundle via API.

Resources:

• Evaluations Public API Resource Reference
• Evaluations Public API Blog Post

Studio and Functions can now be used to develop compliant healthcare applications that contain protected health information (PHI) for organizations that are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Twilio will sign Business Associate Addendums (BAA) with covered entities and business associates for HIPAA Eligible Products and Services.

Learn more about how to build on Twilio for HIPAA compliance.

Twilio Media Streams is now bi-directional. Developers can now stream audio from their own or third party apps back to Twilio enabling use cases such as conversational IVR, integrations with a regional provider for custom Text-to-Speech, and a lot more. This builds on existing support for forking the audio stream of your Programmable Voice calls in real-time and sending the stream to the destination of your choosing to build use cases such as real-time transcriptions, voice authentication, sentiment analysis, speech analytics, and more.

Bi-directional streaming with <Connect> <Stream> TwiML is a synchronous API, giving developers full control over the phone call. In addition, the new <Connect><Stream> API supports new event messages such as Mark and Clear allowing you to build barge-in functionality from within your application.

Check out connect-basic for basic use of the bi-directional streaming API. To learn more about building a conversational IVR using Dialogflow and using mark & clear to implement barge-in functionality, please visit Dialogflow integration GitHub code sample. 

We are excited to announce the General Availability of Messaging Insights for all customers in console. Messaging Insights offers unprecedented transparency for customers to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize message deliverability and engagement on Twilio.     

The GA launch enables multidimensional filters, a Message List view and the following four reports. 

1. Overview: high-level view of your outgoing and incoming messages
2. Delivery & Errors: deep dive into factors that affect deliverability to help you identify what is causing an issue 
3. Responses: visualize and filter the inbound messages that you’re receiving back from your end users
4. OTP Conversion: aggregate and visualizes the information that you have sent to Twilio about successful OTP messages

Messaging Insights is available on the Twilio console for all customers. To learn more see the Messaging Insights docs.

Twilio is open sourcing a Voice Notification App built in ReactJS for the Web. This reference app can be deployed to Heroku in minutes and demonstrates how to leverage Programmable Voice and Twilio SDKs to create a voice notification system to make calls to your customers to deliver time-sensitive messages. Whether you are building a voice notifications solution for Emergency Alerts, Appointment Reminders or Sales & Marketing use cases, this reference app can be used as a starting point.

Access to the source code will help customers understand how to use Twilio “building blocks” and Programmable Voice APIs to build an application for their own notification use case and accelerate development.

For additional information on getting started see the source code repo here.

This release includes support for the expansion of Twilio’s Global Infrastructure via Edge Locations which allows connectivity control into and out of Twilio’s platform. These changes will provide an improved experience bringing Twilio’s public and private connectivity closer to your application. 

Note: All these changes are backward compatible and will not impact existing configurations. 


Programmable Voice supports Edge Locations for connections to Twilio’s infrastructure via the Base URL in Twilio's API api.{edge}.us1.twilio.com.

Example

// eg: api.{edge}.us1.twilio.com

https://api.ashburn.us1.twilio.com/2010-04-01

Receiving SIP from Twilio using the edge parameter. To specify the geographic edge from which Twilio will send SIP-out traffic towards your communication infrastructure, you must include the edge parameter in your SIP URI.

Example

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<Response>
    <Dial>
        <Sip>sip:alice@example.com;edge=frankfurt</Sip>
    </Dial>
</Response>

Click here to see the Edge Locations Blog Post and here for additional details on Edge Locations.

Twilio SendGrid now provides two security features that allow you to verify that email event data is being posted by Twilio SendGrid: a Signed Event Webhook and OAuth 2.0. These security features are independent of one another and can be used together.

Twilio SendGrid’s Signed Event Webhook uses the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm to sign requests. The signature allows customers to verify that event data is being posted by Twilio SendGrid.

OAuth 2.0 for the Twilio SendGrid Event Webhook allows customers to verify that Twilio SendGrid is properly authorized by them to post to their URLs using the Client Credentials grant type.

To learn more about these new features, visit our documentation.

Super SIM has been added to the API Explorer.  Use the API Explorer to test out Super SIM API calls from Console.  

You can use the API Explorer to perform actions that can currently only be done through the API, such as sending SMS Commands to your Super SIMs, from Console.

Twilio is releasing RC Reusable Objects to allow customers to reuse previously uploaded identity and supporting documentation. This enhancement will reduce the time they spend creating Regulatory Bundles and makes Phone Number provisioning via the Twilio Console a more efficient process.