The company’s Automated Speech Recognition beta will take a caller’s speech and turn it into text. Twilio’s technology hands the text off to developers so their systems can respond to what people say, rather than requiring customers to navigate menus using phone keypads.
It’s a move by the company to expand the value of its voice tools for developers by adding a layer of machine intelligence over existing support for sending phone calls and texts using code.
Automated Speech Recognition uses Google’s Cloud Speech API to handle 89 different languages and dialects, including Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Developers are billed on a pay-as-you-go basis, starting at two cents per 15 seconds of voice recognition.
Twilio also announced that it plans to launch a new Understand API that will use natural language processing to provide programs with information about the intent of text passed to it. The API is supposed to work natively with Twilio’s Voice and SMS tools, plus Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant.
