Twilio Conference now supports Announcements

Twilio Conference now supports Announcements

Twilio Conference now supports Announcements

We are excited to announce support for Announcements in Twilio Conference. Over the last several years, Conference has become a critical part of everything from managing incident responses involving a large number of participants or powering advanced call controls such as hold, transfers, monitor, coach, or barge in a contact center. In the past, developers were forced to transfer the Participant out of conference to be able to Play or Say as a workaround for Announcements. The new Announcement feature significantly simplifies the process by using one API call to Play or Say into Conference.

The API for Announcement adds two new optional parameters to the Conference and Participant API.

• AnnounceUrl: The AnnounceUrl attribute lets you specify a URL for Announcement. The URL may be an MP3, a WAV, or a TwiML document that uses <Play> or <Say>.
• AnnounceMethod: Specify GET or POST; defaults to POST.

Legal Disclaimer to a Participant

Compliance plays a big role in many contact center use cases, often requiring businesses to play a legal disclaimer to their customers when successfully connecting with an agent. For example, a business may notify customers a conversation is being recorded; although this notification is typically done manually by the agent, doing so isn’t always reliable for agents handling many such calls every day. A better approach is to automate the process by capturing the join event on Conference and then sending the Announce disclaimer just to the Participant.

When calls are being recorded, you’re also required to play a “beep” sound periodically in the background so participants are aware of the recording. You can do so easily by scheduling a job in your app so that each time the timer expires, it uses Conference Announcement to play a wav/mp3 file containing a beep.  

If you have any questions about Conference Announcement, please reach out to us at support@twilio.com. We can’t wait to hear what you build with the new Announcement feature!