Twilio Reinvents Business Communications with New Solutions
Twilio, the leading cloud-based Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) platform for developers, continues to reinvent business communications with its two new offerings: Twilio Proxy and Twilio Functions. Announced at Twilio’s biannual SIGNAL conference, a developer conference for communications, Twilio Proxy and Twilio Functions are two key components of the company’s broader suite of services designed to enable developers to make building multi-channel communications faster and much easier.
In this article, Patrick Malatack, the General Manager of Messaging and Vice President of Product at Twilio, talks with VoipReview.org about the company’s newest developer-centric solutions and shares how Twilio is transforming the future of business communications through user-friendly software and APIs.
Twilio Enabling Seamless Communications with Robust Tools
During its SIGNAL conference, Twilio announced a number of exciting new tools to help developers enable seamless, customizable communications further. The headliners were Proxy and Functions.
Twilio Proxy
Announced as part of the Twilio Engagement Cloud, a collection of declarative APIs that handle the communications logic businesses and their developers need for building multi-channel communications with customers, Proxy is a new API that powers private text and voice conversations between customers and a company’s mobile workers.
According to Malatack, the popularity of on-demand services (such as on-demand car drivers, tutors, hosts, and other mobile workers) has created a new standard as to how mobile workers utilize their devices to connect and communicate with customers directly. Privacy and filtering out inappropriate content, in particular, has become a major concern for companies that facilitate such communications. “Before Proxy, building these capabilities required a significant amount of software development to get right, especially at global scale," revealed Malatack. "Now, with just a few lines of code, developers can use Twilio Proxy to manage communications at any scale."
Proxy capabilities include the following:
- Multi-Channel Masked Communications - With Proxy, developers can identify the two parties involved in a conversation. Proxy then takes over to automatically route all calls and messages. Twilio Proxy supports two-way communications over voice, SMS, and leading team messaging services including Slack, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Twitter, Viber, Line, BlackBerry Messenger, HipChat and Kik.
- Phone Number Management - Proxy takes care of the communication logic to set up intermediate phone numbers for voice calls and SMS.
- Content Moderation - Developers also have the ability to moderate content. They can configure rules for filtering and redacting messages between two parties via Proxy, helping to avoid profanity and sharing of other critical information in conversations.
- Time-Bounded Sessions - Proxy also offers the ability to manage every active communication. This includes specifying how long a customer can contact a mobile worker and replacing a worker with another based on schedules.
Twilio Functions
Functions, meanwhile, is a new serverless developer environment that enables developers to further accelerate building and deploying on Twilio. With Functions, developers and businesses can set their sights on building and enhancing the application experience instead of shifting their focus towards the web infrastructure required to run it.
"Writing code is a creative endeavor," said Malatack in a release. "The developers and businesses building cloud communications apps should be focusing on the customer experience, not managing servers. Fueling the future of communications starts with unleashing developer creativity, and that's exactly what Twilio Functions was designed to do. We can't wait to see what developers build next!"
Twilio Functions offers developers the following capabilities:
- Complete runtime environment - Functions are part of Twilio Runtime, a pre-configured environment that consists of a plethora of tools (such as helper libraries, API keys, media asset storage, debugging tools, and other resources) that developers need to build, scale, and get their app up and running quickly.
- Zero operational burden - Functions significantly reduces the operational burden by allowing developers to run Twilio code without having to configure, launch, or install any additional infrastructure. What developers need to do is create a function via JavaScript; Twilio then executes the code in a standard Node.js runtime environment.
- Automatic scaling - Another feature of Functions is automatic scaling. Developers only need to write code once and the application, powered by the Twilio infrastructure, will scale automatically.
Transforming Communications with APIs
Committed to building the future of business communications, Twilio equips developers with a robust set of tools to easily embed voice, video, and messaging into web, desktop, and mobile software and applications through simple-to-use APIs. According to Malatack, access to low cost, highly flexible APIs has lowered the barriers to innovation and has allowed companies to innovate on an almost constant basis to stay competitive.
“To date, APIs have been building blocks that developers can access for anything from computer infrastructure to payments to communications,” said Malatack. “Twilio Proxy and Twilio Functions both allow developers to do more with less code. We’re seeing the business problems our customers need to solve and working to provide our customers with choices in order to help them solve those problems faster. And, we believe our declarative APIs, like Proxy, and our serverless environment, Functions, are going to help businesses to get to production scale faster than ever before,” he added.
Learn more about Proxy and Functions and how Twilio is fueling the future of communications by visiting Twilio’s website.
About Twilio
Founded in 2008, Twilio is a leading cloud communications platform that lets developers integrate voice, messaging and video into their applications through APIs. With Twilio’s accessible, pay-as-you-go model, the cost of innovation is low and developers can rapidly experiment and deploy the exact communications they need.