Twilio Changelog

Twilio's support for the WhatsApp Business API is now Generailly Available! In addition to meeting Twilio’s SLA standards for GA products, this change represents an improvement in the product experience, support and resilience, as well as a commitment to offer WhatsApp as a first-class citizen across Twilio products.

To try WhatsApp, head over to Twilio Sandbox for WhatsApp. To get your own number, follow the onboarding instructions to connect your WhatsApp number. Once you are live, you can send and receive WhatsApp messages using the Programmable Messaging API or the Conversations API.

In TaskRouter, you can now evaluate a Worker’s Activity state by referencing worker.activity_sid and worker.activity_name in a Workflow’s target expressions. This allows you to target or exclude agents based on the Activity that they are in.

For example, with Activity-based routing you can:

• Route high-value Tasks to agents even when they are scheduled to not receive general Tasks.
  
• Transfer Tasks to agents who are in Activities that are excluded from routing.
• Designate an Activity that allows an agent to only accept a particular type of task.

To learn more about the new feature, please refer to our documentation on Activity-based routing.

Twilio and Elastic SIP Trunking sign outgoing calls under the SHAKEN/STIR call authentication framework to increase call answer rates. Direct customers can create a Business Profile and enable SHAKEN/STIR in the Twilio Trust Hub and assign their Twilio local and toll-free US phone numbers to receive full attestation so that a trust indicator, “Caller Verified”, can be displayed on devices on participating destination networks.

For more details, please visit here

Twilio Video WebRTC Go is a new product offering that allows developers to build and operate 1:1 WebRTC based applications for free. This developer package provides the infrastructure components (signaling, TURN, logging, & diagnostics) required to run WebRTC applications in production. Participant minutes are free and the 25 GB/month of TURN server usage ensures enough relay support for roughly 100K minutes. To learn more, visit the documentation here.

In addition, a new one-on-one UI layout has been added to the Twilio Video quick deploy apps to support the new WebRTC Go Rooms and provide developers with a clean, modern visual design. Developers can now specify the desired Room type (group, peer-to-peer, or go) when building the quick deploy video app via the Twilio CLI RTC plugin. All the source code for the apps is available here:

• Web -https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-react
• iOS -https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-ios
• Android -https://github.com/twilio/twilio-video-app-android

For additional information about WebRTC Go and details on the new Video troubleshooting tools visit our blog post.

As part of Twilio's support for WhatsApp Business API being made Generally Available, Twilio has redesigned the templates console experience and added support for translations. Here's what's new:

Message templates now have a dedicated page. Navigate to Programmable Messaging > Senders > WhatsApp Templates to submit and view your templates.

Support for translations. Each message template now supports multiple versions across different languages. Instead of submitting one new template for each language, you can now add multiple translations under a single template. WhatsApp limits each account to 250 templates by default, but each template can now contain multiple languages, so this significantly expands the number of messages available to sent as notifications.

Template naming. You can now name each template. This provides context to your template submission and can increase your chances of approval with WhatsApp.

For more info about WhatsApp message templates, please refer to this article.

The Flex Plugins CLI (Command Line Interface) is the new interface for developing, testing, and releasing plugins. It accelerates your plugin development by automating the key workflows you'll use while customizing Flex for your users.

With the Flex Plugins CLI developers can:

• Build new plugins - Start with a blank slate, or build from a template. Access all of Flex’s frontend programmability to customize the UI.
• Deploy and release plugin versions - Define plugin versions to track incremental updates to your customer experience. Deploy updates for each of your plugins individually, or bundle all of your updates together in a single release.
• Manage your version and release history - All of the updates to your plugin versions are tracked as a history of releases. Use this history to quickly identify and track changes in your application, and select a prior configuration to re-release in the event of an issue with your users.

Head over to the installation guide to get started and our migration guide to adopt the Flex Plugins CLI for your existing plugins.

To help developers troubleshoot their applications at scale we are releasing three new Video troubleshooting tools. The first is a console tool called the Video Log Analyzer. It provides detailed information about Video Rooms and Participants. This can be used to quickly investigate Room and Participant issues that occurred in the past 2 days for WebRTC Go Rooms and 7 days for all other Rooms types.

The second is the RTC Diagnostics SDK 1.0.0-beta2, which provides test functions to allow developers troubleshoot camera, microphone, speaker, and network issues. This SDK is a general purpose WebRTC SDK and does not rely on Twilio infrastructure. Developers can incorporate it into their applications for pre-call testing or troubleshooting user issues. The source code and information on using the SDK is available here.

Both the Marketing Campaigns Design Editor and Code Editor now support test data. Test data allows you to render Substitution Tags using sample values directly in each Editor's preview window. By providing test data, you no longer need to send a test email to ensure that your dynamic data will be displayed properly.

Both the Marketing Campaigns Design Editor and Code Editor now support test data. Test data allows you to render Substitution Tags using sample values directly in each Editor's preview window. By providing test data, you no longer need to send a test email to ensure that your dynamic data will be displayed properly.

To get started with your own designs, see Working with Marketing Campaigns Email Designs. For more information on using test data in Marketing Campaigns, see our Design and Code Editor documentation.

We are excited to announce that the Twilio Conversations API is now Generally Available!

Twilio Conversations is a single API for scalable, multiparty conversations across channels. Regardless of whether your clients communicate via web or in-app chat, in WhatsApp conversations, or over native group texting, the Conversations API reduces development time and helps you to deliver a superior customer experience.

In addition to meeting Twilio’s SLA standards for GA products, there’s a ton of new functionality packed into this release. You can read about all of the new features on the Twilio Blog, including dedicated Conversations SDKs for all three platforms – JS, iOS and Android – with support for Delivery Receipts.

We’re also now able to support compliant healthcare use cases for chat and SMS channels that contain protected health information (PHI) for organizations that are subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

Head to the updated Docs and start integrating Conversations into your communication flow. We just cannot wait to see what you build!

Policy updated as of September 28, 2020

Twilio anticipates significant spikes in provisioning of US-based phone numbers as we approach November's 2020 U.S. election. Due to the finite capacity of the U.S. messaging ecosystem, we're implementing a Heightened Awareness Period (HAP) from October 2, 2020 until November 4, 2020. Our goal for this short-term policy is to ensure that all customers have fair access to a secure and reliable network.

During this Heightened Awareness Period, the following limitations will apply:

Account-level long code SMS rate limits have been implemented based on the amount of phone numbers:

• Customers with 2,000 or more 10-digit long code numbers on their project can send up to 2,000 MPS toward the United States.
• Customers with 100,000 or more 10-digit long code numbersas of October 2, 2020 on their project can send up to 4,000 MPS toward the United States. Twilio reserves the right to move the effective date of October 2, 2020 to an earlier date if too much capacity is allocated to customers, putting the network at risk.

For more details, please refer to this FAQ.