Today at its developer event on Las Vegas, AT&T announced a number of new developer tools that should grant those working with its technologies and on its platform new creative latitude.
The new Call Management API, powered by Tropo and Ericsson, extends where a customer’s phone number can be used: thus, a phone number is no longer tied to a phone; it can be used across devices.
Tropo, a product of Voxeo Labs, describes the new capabilities of the Call Management API in the following way: “AT&T’s entire developer community now has access to all of the call control, cross-carrier SMS, text-to-speech and speech recognition capabilities that Tropo.com offers, plus access to AT&T’s suite of other [APIs].” Tropo, similar in some ways to the also popular Twilio, provides voice and text capabilities to developers.
The new API remains in beta. AT&T, for its part, seems excited about how it can extend a user’s phone number to different platforms and experiences, noting that the new tools will “enable browsers to conduct real-time communications, such as voice calling or video chats.” Building applications that take advantage of a phone number instead of an email address for linking folks together could open new communication doors, and help boost the status of hybrid rolodexes, those that bridge email, and phone, not to mention address information.
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AT&T also introduced a new ‘Alpha API’ program today, that will allow developers to submit and suggest ideas for new tools. Third-parties will be the key actors in this specific product push. Two APIs under the program have already made it to the ‘proof-of-concept’ phase.
In short, AT&T has today expanded the number of tools that developers can use to interface with its network. What they will build with their newly enhanced toolset is the next question. The mobile company claimed to have some 2,500 developers at its event. We’ll see what they come up with.
Top Image Credit: jondoeforty1
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