Twilio Changelog

Flex has supported only inbound voice flows natively so far. For outbound capability, either you had to build the Dialpad yourself, use the experimental dialpad, or use one of the community-supported plugins. With this update, Flex now offers native outbound dialing ability right from the Flex UI.

With the Flex Dialpad:

• Agents can call customers directly from Flex and associate it with a relevant queue for reporting.
• Agents can call customers while in an unavailable state, allowing them to remain uninterrupted from incoming tasks.
• While on an outbound call, agents can initiate either Warm
  Transfer or Cold Transfer to another agent or supervisor.
• Supervisors can monitor outbound calls.
• Outbound calls will be presented both in real-time and historical reporting in Flex.
• Developers can build click-to-dial use cases using the programmability offered through the new StartOutboundCall Action.

The Flex Dialpad is a part of the Flex UI and offers all of the theming and customizability features of a React component.

For more details, visit our announcement blog post and the Dialpad documentation.

You can get your hands on the Flex Dialpad now by upgrading your Flex Instance to v1.18 and then enabling Flex Dialpad in your Flex Settings in Twilio Console.

Emergency Calling is now available for Programmable Voice SIP Interfaces in the US and Canada. Customers are now able to make Emergency Calls from their IP communications infrastructure using Programmable Voice SIP Interfaces with the Twilio platform, which will route 911 calls to the appropriate Public Safety Answering Point (or PSAP) and programmatically pass along the corresponding emergency address.

Click here to learn more.

The following additions to the Video Recording service are now Generally Available:

• Recording Composition API: provides developers flexibility to mix the media files of a Room recording into a high-quality, custom layout that matches their specific use case.
• Composition Hooks API: allows developers to streamline the recording workflow by automating the creation of Recording Compositions for every Room.
• Public Key Encryption for Recordings & Compositions: for enhanced security we are offering Enterprise customers the ability to encrypt recordings and compositions with a customer provided public encryption key.
• External AWS S3 Storage: Enterprise customers can configure the Recording service to push Recordings or Compositions directly to their AWS S3 Bucket.

These Video recording features allow developers to create a recording workflow that matches their specific use case and security needs. For example, a customer in the Healthcare industry may decide to encrypt all recordings with their Public Key and have them automatically stored to their external storage, and a customer in the Education space may decide to compose the recording of a virtual classroom into a presentation layout for students.

To learn more check out the blog post or visit the documentation on Recording Composition API, Composition Hooks API, Encrypting your Stored Media and Storing to AWS S3.

You can now send and receive media messages that are up to 16MB in size on Twilio API for WhatsApp, an increase from a previous size limit of 5MB.

The Twilio API for WhatsApp supports sending and receiving images, audio, PDF files, and video. The following formats are currently supported:

• Images: JPG, JPEG, PNG
• Audio: MP3, OGG, AMR
• Documents: PDF
• Video: MP4

Please refer to our Guidance on WhatsApp Media Messages for additional details on media messages on Twilio API for WhatsApp.

Happy building!

Secure Real-time Transport Protocol (SRTP) provides encryption to ensure that the call media is private during transmission over a public network.

Pricing

SRTP Document

Programmable Voice SIP Document

To increase the capacity of chat applications, Actions Per Second (APS) limits for critical operations now apply on a per channel basis, rather than a per Chat Service basis. Until recently the number of messages you sent and number of channels you had were in a competition with each other.

The following operations are rate-limited per channel, with a default maximum set at 30 APS separately for each channel:

• Channel update
• Member create, update, delete
• Message create, update, delete
• Invite create, update, delete

The following operations will still be governed globally, with a single 30 APS limit applying to each Chat Service as a whole:

• Channel create, delete
• User create, update, delete
• Role create, update, delete
• Binding delete

This means users of your application can now communicate as much as they wish to without affecting the application.

Read more on the Programmable Chat Limits page.

To increase the capacity of your application, Actions Per Second (APS) limits for critical operations now apply on a per conversation basis, rather than a per Service basis. Until recently the number of messages you sent and number of conversations you had were in a competition with each other.

The following operations are rate-limited per conversation, with a default maximum set at 30 APS separately for each conversation:

• Conversation update
• Participant create, update, delete
• Message create, update, delete

The following operations will still be governed globally, with a single 30 APS limit applying to each Service as a whole:

• Conversation create, delete
• User create, update, delete
• Role create, update, delete

This means users of your application can now communicate as much as they wish to without affecting the application.

Read more on the Conversations Limits page.

Twilio Media Streams, introduced at SIGNAL 2019, is now Generally Available. Media Streams API gives you access to the raw audio of your Programmable Voice calls by forking the audio stream in real-time and sending it to the destination of your choosing using Websockets or SIPREC. Media Streams lets you improve customer experience in real-time by unlocking use cases such as real-time transcriptions, voice authentication, sentiment analysis, speech analytics and more. Send your forked audio stream to your own application or to a third party provider such as Google Speech-to-Text, Google Dialogflow, Amazon Lex, or Gridspace Sift.

Learn more about how to use it and check out our Github code samples.

To provide the best audio experience for multi-party Voice Conferences we automatically suppress the background noise of participants who are not speaking. However, in a very low-noise Contact Center environment, customers may believe the agent has hung up the call when the agent stops speaking. To avoid this problem we have added a new audio setting called Background Noise Passthrough.

When this setting is enabled the background noise of the agent will be passed through to the customer and provide an audible indication the call is still in progress. This can result in fewer abandoned calls by customers.

To learn more, visit the Conference Settings in the console.

Request Inspector now shows API requests made to Twilio's Voice APIs for call creation, call modification, conference participant creation, conference participant modification, and conference modification with respective parameters. Previously developers would need to enable logging of API request parameters in their applications and manually compare their application logs with the call behavior in Twilio Console to know if a call ended or a participant was muted using the API. These requests are available to view in Console for both completed and in-progress calls. This change simplifies debugging of call behavior issues by providing the API requests, TwiML requests and responses in one place.