The announcements came fast-and-furious at SIGNAL, the annual event that brings together Twilio’s ecosystem of developers, partners and analysts. All told, seven major new offerings were put before the 4,000 or so attendees. They ranged from overtly geeky to pragmatically necessary. In the first category is the introduction to (some would say “return of”) a Command Line Interface. The latter includes a set of four plumbing features that address long recognized deficiencies in the communications and service layers of the telecommunications stack.

Here’s a quick list of the offerings in that category:

• Media Streams: An API that, in the words of Voice Authentication maven Matt Smallman “finally allows users to manipulate and process the audio from calls on their platform in real time.” Prior to Streams, analytics, indexing or categorization of voice conversations was based on recordings.
• Twilio Conversations: Providing developers with a unified API to enable brands to engage with customers in group conversations that cross many messaging platforms, including SMS, MMS, WhatsApp and chat.
• Email Validation: Resulting from Twilio’s acquisition of SendGrid, it is an API that assures that a recipient’s email address is real before it becomes part of an outbound campaign. The result is a decrease in bounce rates and “improved sender reputation.”
• Verified by Twilio: A counter measure to robocalls spoof originating numbers information.

Finally, from the main stage, during the plenary keynote, co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson announced that Autopilot is now “GA” (Generally Available). Autopilot is Twilio’s bot builder, a toolkit and development platform that enables developers to train and deploy AI-powered “bots” that interface seamlessly with Twilio Flex, its contact center offering and many other elements in the Twilio cloud;. Autopilot is of greatest interest to attendees who are interested in shortening the time it takes for companies to bring a useful automated virtual assistant or agent into the critical path between brands and their customers.

Below Opus Research reviews all six announcements.

Streams API: Not Unique But Totally Necessary

Twilio Streams is officially in “public beta,”  giving access to both sides of live voice conversations and enabling developers to do real-time speech analytics, transcription and voice-based authentication, including passive enrollment and matching. Yet, as Matt Smallman points out in this excellent post, Twilio is not alone in providing this type of access to the developer community. Amazon Connect provides similar capabilities as part of its Kinesis Video Streams offer back in December. Matt points out that there are certain constraints to Kinesis architecture. To be specific, it is “customer side audio only,” but that is just fine for supporting voice-based or multifactor authentication that relies on the capture of caller utterances in real time.

Besides, real time access to forked audio streams is a feature of many old-guard customer interaction platforms (Avaya, Genesys, Mitel among them). Among the Telephony API vendors, Vonage Business Cloud (VBC), thanks to Nexmo and its support of WebSockets and Voice RTC, has featured streaming of separate audio channels for almost three years. <https://www.nexmo.com/blog/2016/12/19/streaming-calls-to-a-browser-with-voice-websockets-dr>. In this respect, the highly positive reaction to Twilio’s Stream API signals (see what I did there?) organic demand and a higher level of readiness from the enterprise-based developer community than existed in prior years.

Conversations: Messaging Across Multiple Platforms

Twilio was founded in 2008 to help create a new Telephony Ecosystem, replete with Voice Mashups and a layer of Telephony APIs. During its early years, its original community of developers displayed a nearly insatiable appetite for SMS/Text Messaging, as opposed to minutes of voice services. Then, as new platforms like WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Apple Business Chat built user bases in the billions, thanks to easy enrollment, privacy and end-to-end encryption, those same developers sought a messaging resource that supported cross-platform communications.

Twilio Conversations addresses a long-standing, well-understood challenge. It is the same one that prompted the origination of Jabber and the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) in 1999. As new features and functions have been added to messaging platforms in recent years, support of XMPP has not been enough, a lesson learned the hard way by Cisco, which acquired Jabber in 2008. Smooch Technologies was founded in 2015 to build a unified API for to help connect the 4 billion people using multiple messaging platforms with a minimum of friction and was doing so well, it was acquired by Zendesk to support strong conversational links between brands and their customers. In addition to Zendesk, Twilio can expect to see competition from CRM giant Salesforce, from Contact Center specialists like Genesys and Cisco and fellow Telephony API aggregators Vonage and Amazon Connect.

Email Validation and “Verified by Twilio” Put Spotlight on Trust

The last two major announcements from the big stage at SIGNAL put very strong emphasis on the importance of establishing trusted links between enterprises and their customers. Email Validation comes first because it is the most tangible offer arising from the acquisition of SendGrid in October 2018 for an eye-popping $3 billion. It is also a testimony to the requirement to maintain e-mail as a major component of an omni-channel customer support and marketing strategy. between companies and their customers and prospects. The value proposition for Email Validation was made evident from the big stage when CEO Sameer Dholakia described the database of email addresses that the company knows to belong to verified individuals. The “open rates” for these mailboxes as well as the completed actions (click thought?) are dramatically higher, meaning there is a measurable increase in revenue and return on investment resulting from this flavor of trust.

On the other side of the trust spectrum, Twilio is working with law enforcement and carriers around the world in support of the Shaken/Stir initiative. For those not following closely, the name comes from: “Signature-based Handling of Asserted Information Using toKENs” (SHAKEN) and the Secure Telephone Identity Revisited” (STIR) and it refers to a framework developed in a so-far ineffective attempt to stop fraudulent robocalls that spoof mobile numbers.

AutoPilot Now in General Availability

The big news for bot developers may be the general availability of AutoPilot, the company’s development and management platform for conversational user interfaces deployed on speech-enabled IVRs, chat, text messaging and/or messaging platforms. Autopilot comes with pre-built commands that are designed for business unit professionals (albeit with some level of developer chops). Out of the box, it is trained to understand data types like dates, names and times. There are connectors to contact center infrastructure elements, like Flex, as well as CRM systems in order to get relevant customer data to personalize interactions.

Starting modules include common topics for Banking, Retail & E-commerce, Travel, Automotive, Hospitality, Healthcare and Real Estate. The Web site depicts “pay-as-you-go” pricing models for voice, messaging, chat and “Alexa/Google Assistant.” I’m not a developer and cannot vouch for the quality or pricing, but the response from the crowd to GA status was dramatic and affirmative.

As with the other elements mentioned in this column, AutoPilot will find direct competition from bot-building toolkits that claim to be “open” for use with multiple APIs. Genesys KATE comes to mind in that department. And there are offerings from Amazon, Microsoft, Nuance and other proprietary automated virtual agent developers that are increasingly designed for so-called Citizen Developers. There was no better way to gauge the potential for this cohort of end-users than the visceral reaction of attendees at SIGNAL.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants, Intelligent Authentication