Twilio’s Client Product Now Supports Google’s Cutting Edge Open Source WebRTC

Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers. Twiliocon is going on this week in San Francisco, it’s the second annual conference for the company that makes telephony easy for developers to integrate into their products. Today, the company running it, Twilio, announced that it is releasing beta support for the WebRTC standard for its client product. This means that Twilio stays on the cutting edge of development and insures that its developer ecosoystem has the best tools to choose from.

Plainly put, WebRTC allows real-time voice communication without the need to install pesky plug-ins. It’s a killer piece of technology.

With support from WebRTC, Twilio will allow developers to seamlessly deliver the best experience to their own clients by letting the end-users browser decide whether to display things in Flash, HTML5 or WebRTC. Google Chrome’s current beta supports the open source project that enables real-time communication, and its next official version will be the first consumer Chrome browser to do so. Twilio currently supports 150k developers, up from 100,000 in June of this year. Also, 1.5 million API calls are made. A day.

Here’s what Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, had to say:

At Twilio, we love standards that move the Web forward. We see WebRTC as a great advancement in Web communications, and are excited to let developers building on Twilio Client take advantage of this great new technology. Our developers are building the future of communications apps, so we can’t wait to see what developers will build with WebRTC.

WebRTC brings a better user experience, as well as audio quality to the browser, and this is important for services that have built a product around Twilio’s APIs. Developers don’t have to change a thing within their apps to enable this support, just grab the latest Twilio SDK.

I’m told that the only drawback of WebRTC right now is that Google chooses to make Chrome ask users to allow their computer’s microphone to be turned on during each use. With HTML5 and Flash, these settings can be defaulted and saved. Apparently, Google wants to bring in the WebRTC experience slowly, so look for this to change in the future.

Twilio launched its Client product in 2011 with great results, allowing internal call center apps to be build to support huge organizations.
Earlier this year, Twilio released Twilio Client iOS and Android SDKs, allowing mobile developers to easily add voice capability to their apps. One such service, RingDNA, is over the moon about Twilio. Here’s what its CEO, Howard Brown, had to say:

Because of Twilio’s rock-solid client for iOS SDK, our developers could focus on RingDNA’s core cloud marketing, sales and service features without bearing the prohibitive cost of creating the telephony API ourselves.

Stay tuned for more news from Twiliocon 2012.

[Phone callers photo credit: Flickr]