Twilio Changelog

Since the launch of Functions & Assets in 2017, the two have been a powerful combination. Whether you were using private Assets to store shared logic between Functions or host MP3 files as public Assets for your Functions powered Twilio Voice application. In 2019, we launched a new editor that allowed you to manage your Functions & Assets in one editor interface and using one API, but the two remained separate products in the Console.

Today we are merging the two into one central place in the Console to reduce confusion and make them more easily accessible.

We are excited to announce that Flex Conversations is available in public beta.

Flex Conversations introduces the new async channel platform to easily build SMS/MMS, WhatsApp, and Chat channels in Flex. This release includes:

• Support for Conversations API, the single API to manage all asynchronous channels including SMS/MMS. WhatsApp, and Chat
• New Interactions API to set up and manage inbound and outbound communications
• An open source React based chat application to help you get started with creating and embedding webchat into your website
• Attachment support for all channels that support attachments
• Conversations support in Twilio Studio

Flex Conversations requires Flex UI 2.0. See the Flex UI 2.0 docs for more info and how to perform a migration.

You can read more about this launch on our blog, and if you’re ready to start building, dive into our docs.

Call recordings are now stored by Twilio in dual-channel by default for no additional cost, enabling you to process the individual participants of the call recorded. With this change, the recording audio files of a 2-party call will have two channels and contain the audio from each call leg in a separate channel.

Prior to this release, customers needed to specify dual-channel to record each participant in a separate channel, and all audio mixed in a single channel was the default behavior. With this release, a new RequestedChannels query parameter can be used to specify whether the file should be downmixed to a single channel or downloaded as a dual-channel file. For backward compatibility, when RequestedChannels query parameter is not specified, the default download will be either mono or dual, depending on what was requested for the recording.

It’s possible to continue enabling single-party call recordings using the recordingTrack parameter to select whether the inbound or outbound audio tracks of the call should be recorded, and the recording file will always be mono and no additional tracks recorded. Voice recordings where dual-channel is not supported, such as TwiML <conference> noun and <record> verb, all audio will be mixed in a single channel file.

With this release, storing dual-channel recordings comes at no extra cost compared to single-channel storage.

Dual-channel call recordings by default is now available on all new accounts and will be gradually deployed on existing accounts.

Learn more about how it can help unlock intelligence from your recordings by increasing transcription accuracy. on the Twilio blog.

Sending WhatsApp messages with media now supports additional content types in a public beta, including Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and certain audio files. See this document more information on all the different media types we support.

In this release of Flex UI, we have introduced a Degraded mode for Flex UI - now Flex UI will initialize with limited capabilities, even if some of the components like SDK’s (TaskRouter, Conversations, Voice or Sync) are down. In case of disruptions in Twilio services, Flex User will be able to login to Flex and perform certain tasks that are still available. For example, in the case of Twilio Voice experiencing an incident, your agent will still be able to handle messaging tasks.

Users will see a notification informing them of a possible disruption in the normal operation of Flex UI and they will be able to download a thorough report with error details and logs.

For more on error handling and reporting, check out our Troubleshooting Flex UI guide.

Bounce Classifications are now included in the Twilio SendGrid Event Webhook. The event webhook is a powerful way for you to consume event level data to gather more insight to your email performance. Twilio SendGrid's Event Webhook will allow you to use a data aggregator of your choice and notify a URL via HTTP POST with information about events that occur as Twilio SendGrid processes your email. The addition of Bounce Classifications to the Bounce and Deferral event payloads will provide additional insight as to why an email was bounced, blocked, or deferred.

Twilio SendGrid started limiting category statistics for new customers only on March 16, 2022. Beginning May 16, 2022, Twilio SendGrid will limit category statistics for all customers on a seven-day rolling basis. This means all categories will be available for the first seven days. After seven days, the top 100 categories will be retained for free customers, and the top 1,000 will be retained for paying customers.

Customers who require access to all category statistics can use the Event Webhook to retrieve and retain the data on their own systems as long as they save it within seven days of first sending the event.

Twilio SendGrid accounts created before March 16, 2022 will temporarily retain access to all category statistics created before May 16, 2022. However, access to unlimited category data is transitory and should not be expected to persist.

For more information about how this change works, please see the "Limitations" section of our "Working with Categories" documentation.

Many customers find that Unique Arguments, which are not limited, are the best solution for their needs. See the "Categories vs Unique Arguments: Benefits & Limitations" blog post to better understand these two tracking tools.

The Marchex Transcription with Conversation Intent and Outcome is now available in Twilio’s Marketplace Add-ons catalog. This Marketplace Add-on identifies the most important attributes of your phone calls such as the primary intent of the caller and outcome of the conversation, using Marchex’s AI powered conversation intelligence capabilities. To learn more about this Add-on and how to enable it for your application, visit the Marketplace Marchex Add-on in the Twilo Console.

External storage for call recordings is now available for all voice customers. Call recordings will remain to be stored at Twilio by default. Alternatively, customers can enable external storage and automatically upload recording files directly to an AWS S3 bucket without additional charges.

To determine whether the recording’s media file is stored externally or at Twilio, a new property mediaUrl has been added to the call recording resource with the full URL location of the file; this will apply also to existing RecordingUrl property from the RecordingStatusCallback. When external storage is enabled, recording files from two-party calls get uploaded as dual-channel regardless if they are requested to be mono or dual-channel. Recording resource metadata is available at Twilio until explicit deletion.

Prior to this release, recording status callbacks could be used for automating recording file download and deletion but required additional software development and additional API requests by customers to set up this workflow.

Learn more.

You can now manage the configurations related to a unique address (i.e. a WhatsApp or SMS phone number) within Conversations. This resource allows you to specify which addresses should auto-create a Conversation upon receiving an inbound message.

With this feature, you can also automatically attach a Conversation-scoped Webhook to the auto-created conversation.

Explore the Address Configuration API documentation and give it a try!