Twilio Changelog

With the new Play action, you can use pre-recorded audio in addition to text-to-speech to interact with callers. This is especially useful if you have a well-defined IVR script and need to use pre-recorded voices for reasons related to brand and experience. Learn how to use Play in the docs.

The Twilio CLI lets you access all of Twilio’s APIs through the command line to do things like buy and provision phone numbers, send messages and handle incoming calls. It also has a unique plugin model that makes it easy to extend its functionality that we’ve leveraged to build the Autopilot Plugin. You can use it to manage your Autopilot bots, CRUD Tasks, Fields and Webhooks, and add Samples and Field Values directly from a .csv file. Learn how to use the Autopilot Plugin for the Twilio CLI in the docs.

Collect's Prefill feature intelligently skips questions asking for information the user has already provided in the utterance invoking the task. Prefill can be enabled separately on each question by setting the prefill attribute to the Field Name expected. Learn how to use Prefill in the docs.

When building an IVR with Autopilot, you can now provide callers the option to use DTMF alongside speech to interact with the bot. This is especially useful if they need to provide a long numerical sequence like a bank account number in their response, or need to confirm the data the bot has collected. You can use the Listen and Collect actions to add DTMF support to your Autopilot IVRs. Learn more about using DTMF with Listen and Collect in the docs.

TaskRouter no longer immediately deletes tasks if they pass the final step in a workflow without an accepted reservation. After the Workflow Timeout event, these tasks will now transition to Canceled, and the relevant events are being emitted via the TaskRouter REST API Events Resource.

To learn more about the lifecycle of a task, refer to our documentation on task state and workflow execution.

The Video Composition Hooks REST API allows developers to automate the creation of Video Compositions. Using it, developers can create, fetch, edit and delete Composition Hooks. A Composition Hook is a template that defines how the Recordings of a Group Room should be mixed. When a Group Room is completed, all the enabled Composition Hooks in the Twilio Account will be executed against that room recordings and the corresponding compositions will be automatically created.

With this release developers can now deliver custom parameters to a participant in a Twilio Voice Conference. You can build a richer application experience for end users and display valuable contextual details about the incoming call, for example customer name, type, or product of interest.

The custom parameters can be specified as a query string in ‘to’ field of the Create Conference Participant REST API and delivered via the Twilio Voice Client. Additional information is available here.

Starting today, read message status and location message are available to all developers building on the Twilio API for Whatsapp.

• Read message status: When an outbound WhatsApp message is opened by the end user, this will generate a status callback indicating the message was read. Read status will also be shown in the message logs and the Message Resource API. See our documentation for more details.
• Location message: You can now send location messages over Whatsapp, by including the PersistentAction parameter in your API requests. Location message is currently only supported in Session Messages. See our documentation for more details.

Check out our blog post on using these new features to build deeper customer engagement experience via messaging.

Introducing SIP Refer that allows you to transfer a call back to your IP Communication infrastructure and remove Twilio from the call path.

With Twilio you can now receive SIP Refer towards your IP communication infrastructure using the newly introduced TwilML verb called <Refer>.

Along with the rich programmability services of Twilio, this feature allows you to stay connected with your own known infrastructure for existing connections and provides data security for regulatory purposes by keeping the data within your network.

For details, please check our Refer Verb documentation.

Twilio Narrowband is now Generally Available (GA). Twilio Narrowband is the first developer platform in the United States that provides access to the T-Mobile Narrowband (or NB-IoT) network.

To learn more, refer to the announcement on the Twilio blog and take a look at the Narrowband docs to get started.