Twilio brings conferencing to its phone APIs

Foreign. Who are you? Hey Robert. I'm Jeff, founder and CEO of Twilio. We are cloud infrastructure for telecommunications apps.

And we've done a whole separate video with you. So go to YouTube and search on Twilio. So what are you showing me? Well, first just spend a minute talking about what you do in case somebody didn't watch that previous video.

Absolutely. But they should watch it. It was very good. The idea behind Twilio is developers have a lot of use cases for incorporating communications, phone numbers, phone calls in and out, SMS in and out into their applications. And Twilio is infrastructure available on demand in the cloud that you can use to incorporate communications into your app. So for example, if you want to build a click to call, if you want to build all the way up to a whole call center on top of Twilio, you can do that with simple tools, simple APIs that are all based on web standards and web development paradigms, that a web developer who has no experience whatsoever in telecom can get up and running and build scalable, reliable, interesting applications in just a few minutes time.

Copy and paste coding?

Yeah, basically. And it's things like HTTP and XML that are very much at the center of what developers are already doing in building web apps. And now they can use those same tools to build apps that make phone calls to phones and receive phone calls via phone numbers and send and receive text messages and things like that.

Cool. What are you announcing today?

Well, what's really interesting, we've been doing this for about two and a half years and all along Twilio has been about connecting your phones to applications to provide business logic, to do Things like build IVRs or PBXs or call centers or any number of things. But the unifying thread between all these apps is that you took your existing phone, be it a landline or a cell phone, and hooked it into Twilio via the phone network via 10 digit phone numbers. So you dial a 10 digit phone number from, from your cell phone and that would cause the phone number that you got from Twilio to call out to your app and request a XML document that we would then execute that let you do things like playing back text and playing audio, or dialing other phones or conferencing and things like that. But the unifying thread was it was always your real phones, your cell phones, your landlines, etc. And so what's interesting is that for certain use cases, it meant that you had to whip out your phone and dial 10 digits to make a call or in Particular, you would have to pay your cell ph or you'd have to pay for landlines and a bunch of Cisco gear, or a bunch of Avaya gear, or any existing infrastructure that you had, you had to pay for. And then also build Twilio on top of it. So what we're announcing today is Twilio client. So Twilio client is an SDK that developers can use to embed into their apps into their web, iOS or Android apps to build a native audio pipe from their app directly into Twilio.

So instead of using my phone number, my AT&T number, my Verizon number, I just start up an app. You know, it could be a fubar app for some corporation and I click a button and now I'm talking to that company through the Twilio infrastructure.

Yep. Or let's say you wanted to. Let's say you want to do a conference call and you click the button and it would initiate call into Twilio using the audio pipe that is Twilio client and connect you to other Twilio clients, be they web browsers, be they iOS devices, iPads, iPhones, Android devices, tablets or even traditional phones. So now you can mix and match different clients, be they directly from browser into Twilio, from mobile devices and traditional PSTN connected devices like landlines and cell phones.

Can I call from Skype into this thing or is there any Skype or any other kind of interconnect or is it just Twilio to Twilio?

So it's all connected either Twilio client or via the phone network. So anything that can dial 10 digit numbers like Skype can use if you.

Pay it for the Skype callout feature.

Yeah, exactly. But it's not natively integrated into Skype.

Got it.

And so what's really interesting is it opens up all of these use cases where people want to connect directly from an app and have people talking to each other or even talking to their two aspects of their app. So for example, you can open up this audio pipe and you can dial out to 10 digit phone numbers. You can dial out to other clients that are.

Oh, so you can dial out from Twilio out to a regular phone.

Yeah, so I'll explain to you how it works. So Twilio client, essentially I'll talk about the web version of it is basically two lines of code, Right. So you first drop in the JS file, the Twilio JS file. That brings the client into your web app. Then you have basically just two functions that you have to think about. So the first function creates this object Twilio.device you have a virtual device, Twilio.device.connect and you give Twilio client the URL of a web app that is going to essentially direct the behavior of what happens when you connect in. And it's just like Twilio works today where you can say text, playback audio, dial phones, dial conferences, record audio, all sorts of things. You've got full expression of Twilio's language, twiml to be able to build applications that do a number of things.

So let's talk about Rackspace. Rackspace has a website, rackspace.com we have a chat app there. So customers, is that going to be.

Like a chiron down here, like Rackspace.com? no, you assume I'm a professional.

So on our website we have a chat app today so people can text chat with us, but we could actually replace that with a Twilio app. So somebody can come in and just click a button and be talking to our support people.

Yeah, exactly. So you can click a button and just start talking into your browser. And on the other side you could have people at a call center connected to their regular thing, or you could have your call center employees also talking into their browser and connecting to each other directly. And you get rid of the dial 10 digits and the hunting and pecking around. And it's also very interesting, right, because you connect straight from the browser app and so you can pop up on the agent's screen. Here's the webpage they're calling from, here's the Google search term they used to enter Rackspace, here's their account number, all.

Sorts of things on the Rackspace side, do I need to do anything to my phone infrastructure to do this or do I just. What do I do?

Yeah, so you could just connect into the existing phone infrastructure via a phone number. So if your call center has a toll free number that people dial into, you can use Twilio to just dial into that number and then bridge a browser into your existing call center. You can also have your agents add a browser with Twilio client receiving calls, which is the second thing that I was going to say. There are two functions. One is connect and that initiates connection from the browser out to Twilio where you can do all these interesting things. The second one is dot incoming and I could register a name for that client. So I can name this client Scoville. Then later your app can say dial Scoville and that JavaScript app gets a notification that says you're receiving an incoming connection. You want to accept it.

Now, that's interesting. All of our customers have real names. They're registered in the system. They might be in Salesforce, for instance. They might have data about them. They're probably on Facebook, right?

Yep.

Everybody's on Facebook except for other weird ones. Can I build a new kind of customer relationship management app that when you hit your button on my app, it shows your name and tells me something about you and shows me all the tweets? Yeah.

So imagine this.

So I know that you're really pissed off because you've been tweeting about it for a whole lot.

Yeah, exactly. So imagine, you know, I'm on your website and I click, you know, talk to support, because, man, I'm angry. And it connects in to Twilio and it rings one or even a bunch. I mean, you can ring all of your agents and whoever answers first gets it. And when they answer, you pull through all this data. So who are you? Right. Pull up a Twitter feed, pull up a Facebook feed, pull up your data from salesforce.com, pull up even internal systems. Because it's all done via web standards and it's all done via web programming. It's trivial to say, okay, well, I can include metadata about who you know, knowledge I have of the person on the front end, send it through in the quest, and the back end, pull up all sorts of rich data and create a really tightly integrated CRM plus call center application with Twilio client.

Now, let's take this out of the Rackspace world. Let's say I'm Barack Obama and I'm running for president and I'm running the website there. I'm gonna need. I'm gonna have lots of incoming calls every day. And to tell Brock what what to do. XR meeting going to be a fun thing we're going to do. How do I get routed to people and can I have 100 people answering calls? And how do those inbound calls off the web get routed around?

Yeah, so it's really interesting. So Twilio has this tumult language that when you connect in via the phone network. So the phone network is a big audio pipe. Right. And the way you address it is via a phone number. So the way Twilio works today.

But we're going to be cool. We're going to have a Facebook page with a little Twilio.

Yeah, exactly.

It's going to say, call and tell.

Barack Obama what you think? Yeah. So it's really interesting because when you call in via a regular phone number, Twilio uses a URL and it tells us what to do. And you can. And we have people who do this today, right. They might find an available agent, they might ring everybody and get the first person who answers. There's a number of ways to figure out who is available to take a call. And that's how people do it today. With Twilio in the call center world and with Twilio Client, it's the same thing, but it's actually a lot easier because instead of ringing phones and doing all sorts of things and figuring out edge cases like, oh, is such and such on an airplane and their cell phone went straight to voicemail or whatever, you just say, Twilio client. And as many people who are online, their browser, app or mobile apps would get that notification bubbling up that says, you're receiving an incoming connection regarding Barack Obama, accept it. Are you available or not? And once you accept it, the first person who answers, everybody else would go quiet, and now I'm talking to you.

When I worked the support port lines at Microsoft, they had an automated system that answered the call and sort of asked you a little bit of information, and then you would get put into a queue. And when I'm sitting there on the desk answering calls, there would be a queue on my desktop and it would say, hey, here's this person waiting 10 minutes. And you would click on them and they would be talking to them, hey, it's Jane Smith. What's up? You know what's going on that you.

Need to call Microsoft and can you.

Do the same thing? Do you have to build those systems?

Exactly. So if you think about, yeah, you do build it because we're a developer tool. But the primitives of it are really easy. So somebody calls in and you can play music using Twilio, and you play music while they're on hold. And then you can build a user interface that says, hey, you know that guy who we're playing music to? I want to talk to them now. And there's an API that says, take that call, dial out to my client and connect the two together. And suddenly I'm talking to you.

Instead of Muzak, can I say, here's Angry Birds for you to play while you're on hold.

You know, it's interesting. An early use case we had for Twilio that we thought was just fun was the notion that while you're on hold, you could play games or that you could chat with all the other people who are on hold and try to solve each other's problems or jokes.

Because they might get more and more pissed. Damn, I've been down for four hours. I didn't know that. I didn't know it was down for hard.

It's actually really interesting. There's so many cool things you could do with people on hold. Experiment. I love that.

But yeah, just keep them off of Twitter, I guess you could build a Twitter app, you know, hey, go check out Twitter while you're waiting on read.

Tweets about the company. Yeah, how about read press releases to you? That would really piss you off.

Oh, yeah. We should do a whole TechCrunch festival. How to do the most evil phone system ever.

The most irritating whole.

Can I do a podcast with this? Can I? You know, if I'm Neil laporte and I'm gonna have call in. Hey, call in, Leave a minute of audio about XYZ issue. What do you think about Google? Google came out when we were filming. What do you think of this new Google thing? And leave a minute of audio. Can I record that and do something with it?

Yeah. So what's really cool is that Twilio client isn't itself a phone, but it's an audio pipe from your browser or from your iOS or Android app into Twilio. And so you can do things like connecting to Twilio and and then use our record functionality to start recording. So you want to record a podcast. You could do that and just open the connection, record for an hour and then close the connection. And you've got a recording stored on Twilio servers that you can get back as a Wave or an MP3. And it's a really syncast.

I can call a number and it says, hey, after the beep, you can start recording your podcast and you start talking. And when you hang up, it automatically puts it out to the web.

But you know, it's really interesting that up until now doing it, what you would think is a very simple thing, like, I got a microphone on my computer. Just open up the microphone and record some audio from it to the web. It's actually been really hard, right? And people do all sorts of crazy things to try to do a very simple thing. So Twilio client. Yeah, that's one of the things you can do is just open a connection, record the audio, and then you've got an MP3. Similar things like playing back speech, doing text to speech, or playing back audio, playing back MP3s to people that click a button, opens a connection, plays back in MP3. So it's a very flexible tool that there's a lot of traditional use cases in telecommunications that you think of, such as click to calls or call centers or IVRs and PBXs and company phones and things like that. But there's also all sorts of really interesting use cases that are way outside the realm of what people think about as telecom, like doing podcasting on the outbound side.

Let's say I'm Barack Obama and I want to call 10,000 people today and remind them to vote. Can I do that? Can I, can I have it automatically dial out and say, hey, Jane Smith, we know you're in our voter record and please get out and vote today.

So we, we already have both major political parties as customers.

I figured.

What'S interesting about that, you know, you could.

They care about voice a lot. I used to work the voice lines.

Well, there's really interesting use cases when you think about phone banking. So getting out the vote, right? So, hey, Robert, you're going to call Jeff, because I'm in a swing state and you want to make sure that I vote today. There's really interesting use cases, but phone banking historically has been a lot of talking into my cell phone and dialing a lot of numbers and all sorts of things like that. And with Twilio client, you can just sit there with a browser and go through and call people without ever hanging up the phone, with call scripts coming up automatically as I'm talking and really cool things like that that streamline the whole system because you don't have a wonky interface, which is the phone and dialing digits and getting. I remember the first time I phone banked in 2006, I printed out stuff on paper and faxed it back.

Oh, my God, these are the stories we're going to tell our kids. When I was a kid, I printed stuff out. I had this thing called a phone.

We have the fax machine, right? And so it's really cool the kinds of things you can do. And the only thing I really like, you know, you said like, okay, Barack Obama wants to call. Well, you know, people do these town hall meetings, right? And again, using the pstn, a lot of people have to call in. It's actually really, you know, it's a complex thing to orchestrate a phone call over the PSTN with tens of thousands of people. But with Twilio client, you just say, hey, go to this URL, go to this website. And now you Connect in and you can actually listen to it through your computer speakers live or mix and match. Have some people call in from real phone if they happen to be in their car, or from a web app, you know, I imagine. Or from a mobile app. Right. I bet there's going to be a Barack Obama iPhone app come next election. I don't know exactly what it's going to do, but one of the things it could do is actually let you participate in very massive conference calls where you're essentially doing that town hall meeting kind of thing.

Very cool. Is there a limit to number of people that can be connected to my little old Mac plus or my Mac Pro on my desk?

Well, it's not taxing at all on your machine. So all that's happening in the cloud, so your machine just sees one connection going up to the cloud. Every other machine just sees one connection to the cloud as well. And we're doing all the hard stuff off in the cloud to mix and match audio and execute. The business logic of taking audio and doing what your app wants us to do, such as a conference call or anything like that.

If I want to do some sort of new radio talk show, can I have one number for people who are actually going to get to talk to each other? Sort of like KGO radio has talk shows and then another number just for people to listen to or another website where people can just listen?

Yeah. So what's really cool is, I mean, you can. It's all programmatic, right.

I mean, we did this on the Gilmore gang, but we have five computers. Each Mac Mini has Skype running on it. Right. And we could get rid of those five computers, it sounds like, and sort of move.

Yeah. So you can have these connections and essentially, you know, you can have people watching live and programmatically you can mute and unmute people and do things like that. Right. So you could say, hey, I've got, you know, 100 people watching live and oh, I have a question from Tim and you know, hit a button on my web UI or a mobile app and it would go in and the business logic would say, unmute him and do things like that. So it's all. The really cool thing is it's all mix and match, right? Because you've got Twilio clients, but you also have the regular old phone network with 10 digit numbers and they behave exactly the same. So we wrote Twilio client so that everything people are doing today with Twilio will work exactly the same. So whether or not that audio pipe is the pstn, the phone network, or whether it's a Twilio client. We don't care.

How do people pay for this new service? Service? This new client.

This is. We don't have the pricing finalized yet.

Okay, so come back. It's coming out today, which is in the middle of July. Right.

What else do I need to know? I'll just go. I'll go. The pricing is. And you can dub in.

I'm not that good. I'll just write it in the show notes. Go look at the show notes.

How about this? Twilio.com pricing sounds great.

And we're going to get a demo.

Of it to see what we're doing. Yeah, let me show you. Okay, so let me show you. So what I have here is this is an app that actually I wrote as a demo.

I do. Damn. The CEO who codes.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

The entire initial Twilio service.

Right. And who are you guys?

Not the entire. Danielle, this is Michael. Michael in PR or what? What?

What?

Marketing.

Marketing. Okay.

Danielle was our first employee.

Excellent.

So what this app does is we call it the Twilio Intercom. And it lets everybody in the company is on this list here. You can see. And it scrolls down and everybody's here. And if they're lit up, that means that they're online and I can click their name. And using Twilio client. Let me move over here a little bit better shot. And using Twilio client, it'll connect to them. And let us talk. So very simple. And I wrote this against a few lines of code to create outgoing connections, receive incoming connections. So let me go click on.

Let's use online.

I'm going to call Thomas and see if he's available.

So you can see who Thomas is lit up.

That means that he's logged in right now. And now it connected into Twilio and my script said, dial Thomas. So now it's ringing on Thomas's machine. We'll see if he happens. Hey, Thomas, how's it going?

It's going all right. Let me turn you down a little bit. What's up?

So we're talking to Robert Scoble here.

Hey, what's up? Hey, Robert Scoble.

How you doing? Pretty good.

That's pretty cool.

And we're talking to the Internet at large as well, but via Robert Scoble. So, yeah, we're filming you. So we're just showing the demo of the Twilio intercom app that we've actually been using to collaborate now for the Last few months. So we've got people who are remote. We use this as our primary collaboration tool with them. And it's been a great way to just be able to click and talk to people. And as you can see, I mean, we're just talking through the speakers and the microphone. It's a lot. You know, it's a great speakerphone experience. And you can also plug in a headset and microphone and that works great as well.

Now this works great for the boys. Can you do things like screen sharing? All the stuff that conference apps do. Can I send a picture to him? Can I do video? Can I do anything else? Can I send anything else through this connection that we have?

Yeah, so not yet. So our initial release here is focused on voice and essentially being an audio pipe. But you know, there's all sorts of interesting things that we may want to add in the future. So, you know, stay tuned.

Okay, very cool.

Thomas actually just walked into the room.

Hi, Thomas, how are you?

Hey, what's up?

And on your. I killed a mute on that.

Just mute. I'll just end the connection.

Okay. What does it look like? It looks the same on your side. Yeah, on my side. This is what we use for right now. One of our engineers is in Sweden and so we use this for our stand ups.

And is Jonas online or is he sleeping? No, he's asleep. It's now like 2:00am the sun is up, but it's 2:00am There, so.

Yes, crystal clear. It's awesome. Very cool.

And I can also show you an example here of doing the phone integration. Right. So if you want to call in, you can also do that. So Danielle, do you want to pick up the phone? Sure. So we wired up a phone number into Twilio client, into the Twilio intercom here.

Yeah.

And you got your phone?

Yeah.

Ready? 415. Oh, you want me to call in? Call in.

Sorry, sorry.

Yes, I would love to call in. 415. 636 304519.

Is that your personal phone number?

Better get a lot of comps. We'll forward it to something fun. So right now I've got accept connection from Danielle and I'll say okay. Hello, Danielle. Hey, how's it going? Yeah, hi.

Internet.

And you can see it's really interesting. Right. That call is going to. From Daniel's cell phone over the AT&T network over the public telephone Network.

I'm surprised @&t works here.

Yeah, exactly. That's the most startling thing. Right. And then all the way down into my browser.

Now, does Twilio have the ability, if you weren't available, to say, hey, you know, I'm not available, like take a voicemail or forward you to somebody else who can answer the call, you know, your assistant or something like that?

Yeah. So that's all about the sort of business logic that the developer typically writes using Twilio to say, hey, I'm going to dial this client. And then let's say nobody answers. We would call back to their app and we would say the dial status was nobody answered. And their app could then say, oh well then I'm going to forward the call to somebody else or I'm going to take a voicemail and you'd use our play to maybe play out a message, sorry, I'm not available, but leave a message and then use our record verb that records audio. And then You've got an MP3 and you can email it to the person, you could surface it in a web ui, all sorts of things. But that's the sort of functionality that our developers build and they completely customize it to the use case of what they're trying to accomplish with a lot of people who do things just like that. Voicemail bridge calls together. If nobody's available now, could it answer automatically?

Daniel's call and say, welcome to United Airlines and please enter your frequent flyer number and we'll take care of you. And then it would show up on your screen, oh, this is Danielle calling and she's, you know, she has 100,000 miles and she's really cool and you want to take care of her.

Totally awful.

She only has 10 miles. You say, oh, I'll answer her after lunch.

Totally, yeah. There's all sorts of things you can do. It's sort of IVR type use cases are what a lot of people build with Twilio. So IVR's interactive voice response. So it's the kind of thing where you might use text to speech or Media or MP3s to play back something like thank you for calling American Airlines. Press 1 for flight status, press 2 to book a new reservation. And what's really interesting is that you can do that functionality via Toyo client. You can do it via a 10 digit phone number. You can mix and match on both the incoming side of how people are calling in as well as on the outbound side of how people call out. So I'll do another example here. I'm gonna, I'm type a phone number. So what's a, what's the phone number? What's Daniel, what's yours? 425. Sorry, you'll have to change your phone number. It's already public.

Mine is too, if you want to call. Mine.

I saw something. You have had yours on your site for five years. Yeah. All right, what's yours?

205425. Sorry, 425-205205. 1921-1921.

Okay, so I'm doing is I'm going to call your cell phone right now.

Yeah.

And you can see it does some text to speed training the number dialing the number is what it says. And there's actually a really interesting thing I'll show you at the end while we're chatting.

Okay, let's see if it dials.

Are you at and T. There we go.

206. Yeah. And we'll answer.

Answer.

Yeah. Hey. Testing, 1, 2, 3. Very cool. Very cool.

So again, you can see it actually it's, you know, very. Listen, congrats, your call was 26 seconds. It said, congrats, your call was 26 seconds. The reason for that is early on in the development of Twilio client, we've been using this internally and we actually had a competition who could log the most minutes on it. So it tells you at the end of the call.

That's interesting because a lot of support people get paid for how quickly they get off the phone.

Yeah, yeah.

So if you're on the phone for an hour, you're costing a lot more money than if you answer a question in a minute.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. Although that's. Does that tell people to get off the phone really quickly and not answer your question?

I don't know.

But the cool thing is, right, it's sort of arbitrary business logic, right? That one, it's a PHP web app that's behind this whole thing and it just keeps track of. Here's how long that call was. And then we decided, you know what, let's tell people how long the call was so that they can log their minutes. And it just plays it for them at the end of the call. And it just does say your call was.

Life's good for a lawyer because lawyers.

Charge you bill by the time.

Yeah, well, my divorce lawyer charged me up the Yang Yang. Every time I called him, you know.

He'D start the clock right away.

They kept track of every minute. I talked to the guy.

Luckily, I think Twilio wasn't involved in your divorce proceedings.

I don't think so. That was a while ago.

So it's really cool. So you Know, it's all about these developer primitives and you can build whatever you want. And the other thing's like you want to take that and instead of playing it back for the person, put it into a database and keep track of calls that way. That's what a lot of people do for tracking calls and things like that. Just the use cases are endless. And that's why we're so excited to see what developers build with Twilio client, because We've got over 40,000 developers using Twilio today with real phones and 10 digit phone numbers and those sorts of interactions. But now we're opening up all sorts of new interactions with really, really excited to see what people build.

That's gonna be a lot of fun to play with.

Along those lines, we've got a demo to show you that in the it's a lot of fun to play with category.

We'll go out in a second and take a look at that. Where do I learn more before we get that demo, where do we learn more about this?

Learn more Twilio.com client okay.

And all the code is there?

Yeah.

What's possible?

Code samples, live demos, you know, explanations of use cases and you know, in particular, it'll be really fast to get up and running.

Is your phone number up there? Can I click to test it out with you?

We'll have something for you.

Well, Cole, thank you so much. You guys are on Twitter and Facebook?

Yeah, twitter.com Twilio Twi L I O, Chiron and you know, any questions, Twilio.com, email us helpilio Twilio.com and yeah, we can't wait to see what you guys build.

Very cool.

Let's go see that.

So what do you.

What did we see? So we're doing a demo of Twilio client. It's a really fun one. And this is one we wrote at an internal hackathon and it's just, it's a blast. So I'm gonna. Hey, Twilio, you guys load up that URL that Danielle just sent around and unplug your headphones and turn up your speaker and I'll show you what the app is. So what, they all loaded up and you can see on his screen, you see that he's got the ballpark.

Yeah.

All right, now remember Lou Gehrig?

Yeah.

Do you remember the speech that he gave?

Yeah.

Fans, for the past two weeks, you've been reading about the bad break I got. Yet this is the famous part, right? Yet today I consider myself Right. So I'm going to have you, Robert, read the speech.

Oh, geez.

Are you ready? All right, so hold on a second. Everybody loaded up? So now I'm going to connect into Twilio client. And it's connecting. And now it says open fans, for.

The past two weeks, you've been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth. I have been in ballparks for 17 years and have never received anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. Awesome. There you go. So that was.

Yeah.

That'S cool.

So that was about 60 Twilio clients loaded up, all playing a stream that we were sending up via this screen here.

Very cool. So you can do a lot of things. You can talk to, have a mute that or kill it. So you can have company meetings. You know, you can use this for.

All sorts of fun stuff. Yeah, exactly. Right. So that kind of use case where, you know, I want one person presenting and a lot of people listening, you can also do things like, in that use case, they were all muted and we were talking. But you could do the opposite. You could unmute them. You can moderate all sorts of things like that. But the whole idea is it's this audio pipe that goes from one browser or one mobile app into the Twilio cloud, and then all any other mobile clients or phones can connect in and interact with it.

Very cool. Well, thank you so much.

Thank you, Robert.