Twilio, the reigning king of communication APIs, is today greatly expanding its original SMS messaging offering from dozens of carriers to over 1,000. With this change, developers can now send SMS messages worldwide (from anywhere, to anywhere) and so its API is also now multilingual, featuring support for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Greek, Russian and “dozens more [languages].”
Back in May, Twilio grew its voice API to support a total of 10 European countries, and so following suit with the SMS API makes perfect sense. According to Patrick Malatack, product manager for Twilio, this move is all about breaking down the “geopolitical boundaries” of the telecom network, so developers can work with it like they do with the Web.
From Twilio CEO and Co-founder Jeff Lawson:
By adding support for multiple languages with the inclusion of the unicode character set, we are opening up opportunities for many locales to use Twilio SMS. It’s very gratifying to be able to ship this to our developers who have been requesting this functionality — now we can’t wait to see what they build.*
SMS hasn’t been the most glamorous of services for quite some time, but its usefulness and complete ubiquity makes it very valuable — especially outside the US. From what we heard, this has been the company’s most requested feature over the years, so hopefully for them, developers will follow through and keep tapping Twilio to communicate with users.
You can check out Twilio’s improved SMS API via the link below. Developers can also explore the Voice API here.
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