Last week, Facebook released Messenger Platform 1.4 which opened up new possibilities for businesses and bot makers. Looking forward to these new features? We’ve prepared a quick rundown of our upcoming platform updates which will make these available to all Smooch users.

Coming next week

We’ve already started work on a number of features which will become available starting next week.

Carousel Image Aspect Ratio

Messenger now lets you have square images inside your carousel on top of the horizontal default.

Your designers are sure to appreciate the new, more common ratio. We’ll be adding image aspect ratio into our Post Message API

Increase the maximum of quick replies to 11

NPS score via quick replies seems a good reason to crank it up to 11. Our Reply button API will now truncate your buttons at 11 when sending to Messenger (note that our API & SDKs support infinite number of replies).

Increase text message length to 640 characters

So far, we’ve been splitting your long messages into multiple ones on Messenger to fit the previous limit of 320 characters. Our logic will now take into account the increased character limit.

Persistent Menu API update

This is one that bots will really appreciate! Messenger’s video shows best the experience you can create with this new menu. We’ll be updating our Persistent Menu API to support menu nesting on both Messenger and WeChat. Seeing how those menus are starting to shape up, we’ll also change our API to allow to configure each channel separately if needed. Disallowing the user from sending freeform messages will also be supported.

Coming later this month

Improved Webview support

Facebook is continuing it’s investment into creating a great web view experience via their Messenger Extension and a few additions to the main API.

We’ll be updating our Link button API to support specifying a Webview height ratio, enabling Messenger extension when opening a Webview as well as defining a fallback URL for Messenger clients without Messenger Extension support.

Coming next month

Customer Matching

We also started designing how we will add support for Customer Matching on Smooch. We’re very excited by customer matching because it enables you, the business, to start the conversation. Messenger is one of the first OTT channel to enable that, the same way it's already possible on SMS, Email and with our mobile and web SDKs.

With our User API, you’ll be able to add a phone number to a user’s profile and then send a message while targeting Messenger as the destination. Smooch will then attempt to match the user on Messenger using the user’s phone number and name if available. If the match is successful, the user will get your message, which will look like a message request in Messenger and Smooch will create a Messenger client for this user.

What next?

We’ll be starting to roll out the first updates in the next few days. Look out for these features in our changelog or follow us on Twitter to get our latest updates.

I’m pleased to introduce our latest email integration: Mailgun.

Mailgun is a reliable email delivery system that enables you to send, receive and track email ‘effortlessly’ and it scales to massive volumes. And it’s trusted by companies we love and admire such as: Stripe, Github, Slack & Heroku.

At Smooch, we’ve been using Mailgun ourselves for a long time and are big fans. They really are the experts in solving all the well known pitfalls of sending and receiving emails programmatically. Mailgun provides all the tools to follow Email best practices and manage your email reputation by using you own company domain, SPF & DKIM signatures, constant sender IP and correctly formed Message ID and Received headers to ultimately keep your email delivery rate as high as possible. You also get detailed reporting on email usage including specifics such as open rates and bounce rates so that you can adapt to the feedback email service providers (such as Gmail) are sending back. For very high usage, Mailgun even offer a fully managed delivery and reputation service.

Now we’ve made it easy for you to bring your own Mailgun account to Smooch so that you can build conversational experiences using email. Simply manage customer communications using our built-in integrations or go further and build email into conversation flows in your own software using the Smooch API.

Smooch manages the email channel just like our other messaging channels such as Facebook Messenger, Viber, SMS and our mobile and web SDKs. This means that if you're using our unified API you can start using email without any additional code.

Email’s place in the messaging world

It's clear that email still has its own valuable place in the messaging world. Depending on your industry, customer segments and specific use case, email is often the preferred channel for your customers or the first one they’ll think about using.

Email is a great channel for conversations that take place over a longer period of time, that aren’t fast-paced or requires longer messages.

For example, we see email being the best channel to send monthly digest or other communication that a customer is likely to keep in archive and want to search for in the future.

Another big advantage of email is that is makes it possible for businesses to initiate conversations without the opt-in constraints that many messaging apps require. It can actually be used as a way to on board your users into a more rich and convenient messaging channel.

How it works

Email on Smooch behaves just like our other channels, here’s how it works:

A customer sends a message to your configured email address, for example info@company.com
You receive their message via all your configured Business system or Webhooks
You can then reply from that same business system or via our Post Message API
Your message is delivered to the email address used by the customer

The integration has great support for our rich channel. For example, messages can contain text, images, unicode emojis and action links. For capabilities not natively supported on email, Smooch will automatically send an adapted text version of the message.

How to set it up

You’ll first need to get yourself a Mailgun account and connect and verify a domain to be used to send & receive emails.

Next, you connect the Mailgun integration in your Smooch dashboard, copy your Mailgun API key into Smooch and select the email address people will use to message you.

Alternatively, you can enable Mailgun via our integration API. You just need to provide your API key, domain and incoming email address and you’re ready to send and receive emails just like messages on other channels.

Time to test it! Send yourself an email to the configured address and check that you’ve received it in your configured business system or webhooks.

All done!

Let us know how you plan on integrating email in your messaging toolbox and make sure to reach out with any feedback or if you need help with your Mailgun integration.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights recent improvements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in March.

This month, we’ve released our first set of features and API updates for Messenger Platform 1.4 which opened up new possibilities for businesses and bot makers on Messenger. We’ve also introduced Mailgun, our latest email integration which makes it easier than ever to manage email communication at scale. Last, but not least, we’ve launched an Early Stage plan, specifically designed for software maker startups building conversational experiences.

What's new 🎊

Mailgun integration

It is now easier than ever to communicate with customers over email using our latest integration: Mailgun. Mailgun is a reliable email delivery system that enables you to send, receive and track email effortlessly and it scales to massive volumes. It provides all the tools to follow email best practices and manage your email reputation, company domain, SPF & DKIM signatures, constant sender IP and more. It is the best way to keep your email delivery rate as high as possible.

It is clear that email still has its own valuable place in the messaging world. Depending on your industry, customer segments and specific use case, email is often the preferred channel for your customers or the first one they’ll think about using. It’s a great channel for conversations that take place over a longer period of time, that aren’t fast-paced or require longer messages. For example, we see email being the best channel to send a monthly digest or other communication that a customer is likely to keep in archive and want to search for in the future.

For more details and instructions on setting it up, check out our complete Mailgun blog post.

Credit card obfuscation

Smooch now automatically hides credit card numbers in messages for increased security and privacy. Based on the Luhn algorithm, credit card numbers are now replaced by an obfuscated one such as ************4242. This means that your business won’t be at risk of leaking a customer’s credit card number inadvertently.

Early Stage plan for startups

We’ve created a new pricing plan for innovative software startups looking to create better customer experiences with messaging. We want to remove one more obstacle from your path so you can focus on growing your startup. Just tell us a little about yourself, and we’ll let you know if you qualify.

Note that this plan is targeted at software makers only. If you’re an early business, check out our generous Essentials plan starting at $60 per month, or get started for free.

Smooch API updates ⚙

OAuth revoke access API

We've updated Smooch Connect so that OAuth integrations can be disabled via the API when a user removes the integration outside of Smooch. OAuth integrators can now use the revoke access API to ensure Smooch doesn't continue to call their app with webhook events.

Improved persistent menu API

We've updated our persistent menu API to support menu nesting on both Messenger and WeChat. Seeing how those menus are starting to shape up, we also changed our API to allow you to configure each channel separately if needed. Disallowing the user from sending freeform messages is also supported on Messenger.

Facebook Messenger improvements

New image ratio for carousel

You can now specify square images inside your carousel in addition to the existing horizontal ratio default setting. Your designers are sure to appreciate the new, more common ratio. See our updated post message API for more details.

Increased number of quick replies

NPS score via quick replies seems a good reason to crank it up to 11. Our reply button API will now truncate your buttons at 11 when sending to Messenger (note that our API & SDKs support infinite number of replies).

Increased character limit

Our logic will now take into account the increased character limit and let you use up to 640 characters, instead of the previous 320.

Improved webview support

We’ve updated our link button API to support specifying a webview height ratio, enabling Messenger extension when opening webviews as well as defining a fallback URL for Messenger clients without Messenger extension support. Learn more in the link button API doc.

Other polishes ✨

Automatic message delivery logic

When responding to users that have multiple channels linked, either via the Linking API or the Web Messenger, Smooch uses an automatic message delivery logic to deliver to the most relevant channels, without spamming your users. We've went ahead and documented how it works since some of you asked. You can read more about it in our guides.

Sneak peek 👀

We’re hard at work building a number of API wrappers, which will make it even easier for developers to enjoy all of Smooch in their preferred language. Stay tuned for more details coming soon on our blog!

Happy messaging!

-The Smooch team

Ever since we launched the Smooch API, we’ve had developers from the community writing simple wrapper code around it. Early on we built smooch-core-js, a javascript library for both the browser (we use it within Web Messenger) and Node.js servers since we are big Javascript fans and Smooch itself is built on Node.

But not everybody speaks (and loves 🔥 ) Javascript. So we set out to build API libraries for more languages to make it easier for developers to build on the Smooch API in their language of choice.

Today, we’re happy to launch official API libraries for Ruby, Python & Java and you can expect more to come.

Swagger API Specification

Using an API spec & code generators for building our API libraries sounded both attractive and scary. We surveyed the API specification standard landscape and tried RAML, Swagger/OpenAPI & API Blueprint. We choose Swagger for its code generator module, swagger-codegen. Using a code generator was the scary part of the project but swagger-codegen positively surprised us with the quality of the code it generates out of the box code and also with its template system which allowed us to tweak the end result to our liking.

We now have a complete Swagger API specification for Smooch. It lives inside this github repo and we’ll update it with every changes to the API. This means you can watch it to follow and easily be notified when we make changes to the API.

Setup and code samples

Our new libraries were built based on the spec and generated by swagger-codegen. All three come with complete code samples for every API endpoint. Here’s how you can install & use each to send a message including setting up the API authentication.

Ruby

Available as a gem:

sudo gem install smooch-api

require 'smooch-api'

SmoochApi.configure do |config|  
  # Configure API key authorization: jwt
  config.api_key['Authorization'] = 'YOUR JWT'
  config.api_key_prefix['Authorization'] = 'Bearer'
end

api_instance = SmoochApi::ConversationApi.new  
user_id = "user_id_example"

message_post_body = SmoochApi::MessagePost.new  
message_post_body.type = "text"  
message_post_body.text = "hello world"

begin  
  result = api_instance.post_message(user_id, message_post_body)
  p result
rescue SmoochApi::ApiError => e  
  puts "Exception when calling ConversationApi->post_message: #{e}"
end  

Python

Available via pip

sudo pip install smooch

import smooch  
from smooch.rest import ApiException  
from pprint import pprint

smooch.configuration.api_key['Authorization'] = 'YOUR_JWT'  
smooch.configuration.api_key_prefix['Authorization'] = 'Bearer'


api_instance = smooch.ConversationApi()  
user_id = 'user_id_example' 

message_post_body = smooch.MessagePost()  
message_post_body.type = 'text'  
message_post_body.text = 'hello world'

try:  
    api_response = api_instance.post_message(user_id, message_post_body)
    pprint(api_response)
except ApiException as e:  
    print("Exception when calling ConversationApi->post_message: %s\n" % e)

Java

Install via Maven by adding this dependency to your project's POM:

<dependency>  
    <groupId>io.smooch</groupId>
    <artifactId>api</artifactId>
    <version>1.1.0</version>
    <scope>compile</scope>
</dependency>  

For Gradle, add this dependency to your project's build file:

compile "io.smooch:api:1.1.0"

import io.smooch.client.ApiClient;  
import io.smooch.client.ApiException;  
import io.smooch.client.Configuration;  
import io.smooch.client.auth.*;  
import io.smooch.client.api.ConversationApi;

ApiClient defaultClient = Configuration.getDefaultApiClient();

ApiKeyAuth jwt = (ApiKeyAuth) defaultClient.getAuthentication("jwt");  
jwt.setApiKey("YOUR JWT");  
jwt.setApiKeyPrefix("Bearer");

ConversationApi apiInstance = new ConversationApi();  
String userId = "userId_example"; 

MessagePost messagePostBody = new MessagePost();  
messagePostBody.type = "text";  
messagePostBody.text = "hello world"

try {  
    PostMessagesResponse result = apiInstance.postMessage(userId, messagePostBody);
    System.out.println(result);
} catch (ApiException e) {
    System.err.println("Exception when calling ConversationApi#postMessage");
    e.printStackTrace();
}

What next?

We are very excited to have this new foundational piece for our API. We plan on leveraging it to add libraries for more languages and also build interactive modules for our API reference.

Let us know which language you'd like us to support next and make sure to reach out with any feedback on the spec and these new API libraries or if you need help with our API.

Last Friday, Twitter announced a number of exciting new API features for developers including a much-anticipated refresh of their direct messaging APIs. These APIs are particularly interesting since they allow businesses to have rich, private, direct message conversations with their customers over Twitter.

For the past few months, we've been in stealth-mode, working with the team at Twitter to bring support for direct messaging to Smooch. I’m really excited to finally be able to introduce it to the world following Twitter’s announcement.

Introducing Twitter DM for Smooch

Starting today, Twitter DM is now available as a customer channel on Smooch. This means that anyone building on the Smooch platform can start adding Twitter DM features to their software using the same unified API that already powers conversations over Facebook Messenger, Viber, WeChat, Web, SMS and more.

Channel capabilities

The Twitter DM integration is very rich and supports many capabilities of the Smooch platform such as sending and receiving images, GIFs and emojis. A business can also send quick replies, location request and rich carousel messages which get automatically translated to fit Twitter’s message-display capabilities. For a full list of what this new channel is capable of, check out our channel capabilities grid.

The state of the Twittersphere

Twitter is an awesome place to engage with your audience, offer customer service and personalized experiences. There are currently 319 million monthly active users on the platform, and of those 100 million are active daily.

Unlike many other social channels, Twitter is often the go to destination for customers to reach out when having issue or complaint with a product or service (especially when they're unfairly dragged off airplanes! 😡). To date, companies providing service over Twitter have had much of their individual communication take place in public, limiting the depth of care and attention they can provide to their customers.

With this new integration, it’s now easier than ever to offer the ability to turn public conversations into a private ones, better serve customers in need, and turn detractors into loyal users with delightful personalized experiences.

One of the champions of customer service on Twitter is Apple. Apple launched their @AppleSupport account in March last year and since then have grown a following of 621 000 users. They’ve been able to create a great experience, even when customers are facing issues by answering them in minutes on a private, personalized channel where Apple can go the extra-mile on a case by case basis.

How do I use it?

Due to account limits put in place by Twitter during their beta period, we're restricting access to the channel to companies building software on the Smooch API. If this describes your business, please contact Twitter mentioning you're a Smooch customer to get priority access.

Alternately, if you already have a whitelisted Twitter app for the Activity API you can already connect it via our Integration API and start building Twitter DM features inside your software.

We’re really excited to see what conversational experiences you’ll build over Twitter and look forward to providing broader access to the channel as it's rolled out.

For more details about these new Twitter API features and Twitter API roadmap, check out these useful links:

• Twitter's blog post on new API features
• Twitter's published API roadmap
• Twitter automation rules and best practices

This week, Facebook knocked our socks off at F8, their annual developer conference. If you haven’t yet seen their augmented reality announcements, you’ve absolutely got to see them! Our team at the conference was absolutely floored and many of our customers and partners in the crowd left equally impressed and excited about the future ahead!

In addition to the awesome new AR platform, huge leaps forward on AI and their sci-fi brain/computer interface, we were happy to see David Marcus announce several new Messenger features as part of Messenger Platform 2.0.

New to Messenger Platform 2.0

Discover, a new way for users to discover bots and businesses in Facebook Messenger, is certainly the biggest piece of 2.0. It was also the most requested feature from bot makers since having a discovery engine on the platform will certainly help get more visibility for your bot or business.

Chat Extensions was also announced and looks like a promising new way to create experiences on the Messenger platform. Having a presence for your bot in the composer and the ability for users to share content inside conversations will help you drive usage as well.

In term of API changes, Messenger Platform 2.0 is relatively lightweight, despite the major version bump. Here are some of the new features and enhancements we’ll be bringing to the Smooch API.

Smooch updates coming early May

With the addition of Parametric Scannable Messenger Codes, we’ll be updating our webhooks to include the referral data that you’ll be embedding in those scannable codes.

We’ll also be augmenting our user profile API to include ad attribution information that Facebook Messenger is now making available.

What next?

We’ll be starting development of these features in the next few days. We also have other platform announcements in the making, but aren’t quite ready to share those yet. Look out for these new features and more in our changelog or follow us on Twitter to get our latest updates.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in April.

It’s been a very satisfying month for Smooch: launching a new channel integration -Twitter DM, improvements to our API libraries targeted towards large organizations, and a lot of new code. Like much of the work we are accomplishing right now, our focus remains on helping companies scale their messaging efforts more efficiently, and more comfortably.

What’s new 🎉

Twitter DM

Twitter has recently announced a lot of exciting new updates to its API. We’ve worked directly with the social network to integrate Twitter direct messages into Smooch. As a result, Twitter DM is now available as a customer channel in our platform.

People around the world take to Twitter to engage with companies for customer service as they appreciate the fast-paced nature of the platform. It’s not all talk: in a recent survey, 77% of Twitter users said they were more likely to recommend a company following a personalized interaction like a Direct Message.

This new messaging channel is very robust and works with most of Smooch’s features, like images, emojis, GIFs and quick replies , allowing you to build a deeper connections to your customers through personal interactions with them.

API Libraries

We want Smooch to be accessible to as many developers and organizations across the globe as possible and that means growing our API libraries. We launched new API Libraries for Ruby, Python, and Java and plan on adding more languages in the future. We built those based on our Swagger API specification, now available as a Github repo which you can follow to be notified on future updates we make to the API.

Message modifier delegate methods for iOS & Android SDKs

We added new hooks to both our iOS and Android SDKs to let you modify messages sent by users as well as filter and modify them before they are displayed. These new delegate methods can enable a variety of advanced use cases, for example: build end-to-end encryption yourself, add context to messages via the metadata field, interpret messages as out-of-band commands, and more.

Developer resources, use cases and sample code 🗃

As we build on our product, we naturally come up with valuable use cases along the way. Rather than keep them in our head, we made it a habit to start building them out to help you do the same. Here are the links to some of the use cases and code samples we developed over the last few weeks:

• API Quickstart: A code sample repo and step-by-step guide to making your first API calls using Smooch. This is the quickest way to kick the tires and get your project off the ground.
• Sample helpdesk implementation: For software makers wanting to create a conversational product, we’ve built a simple multi-channel helpdesk called SmoochDesk entirely powered by the Smooch platform. Use it to visualize end-to-end customers interactions or leverage the code as a reference to help you build your own proof-of-concept.
• Sentiment analysis: Detect the sentiment of a user message using Google Cloud NLP. This is a great tool for customer service and can help disarm situations quicker by using the right tone immediately.
• Message translation: Translate user messages in a language your agents understand. Use it to help agents understand the issue and provide adequate support.
• Data dashboard: Using Chart.io, this piece of code will allow you to forward your webhook events and use them to build charts about your usage of the Smooch API. Use it to assess basic employee performance, or even create more complicated ROI calculations.

Sneak peek 👀

We’ve seen Smooch usage grow tremendously in recent months and many of you are managing huge numbers of Smooch apps for your customers. That’s why we’re working on a dashboard update that makes it a breeze to handle hundreds of accounts at a time. Stay tuned!

Happy messaging!

Smooch Web messenger has been allowing customers to link their Messenger account themselves for almost a year now. We saw a lot of users opt-in to link their account so that they can get a better experience inside an app they are familiar with and also receive notifications when they get a reply.

Today we are adding Facebook Messenger linking via our API so that a business can invite a customer to join them on Messenger.

How does it work?

Smooch Channel Linking API is now leveraging Facebook’s customer matching to allow you to initiate a conversation on Messenger given a phone number. Facebook will attempt to match the phone number to the right user on Messenger. Upon a successful match, the user will receive a message request in Messenger and will be able to opt-in to start the conversation with you. Once they accept, their Messenger account is linked to their Smooch user, and you can reach them on that channel.

Why should I use it?

Unlike most conversations happening on Facebook Messenger where it’s the end-user who must reach out first, using programmatic channel linking allows businesses to initiate the conversation themselves. This type of interaction is a powerful new way to transition your users from one channel to another. For instance, you can move users from SMS to Facebook Messenger and reduce your fees associated with long-running SMS conversations. If your backend has the customer phone number, you can also use the Smooch API to move to Messenger and enable service notifications instantly.

Getting started

Customer matching requires a special permission on your Facebook page, is subject to a $99 USD one-time fee and is currently only available for customers who brings their own Facebook app via the Smooch Integration API. Once the permission is granted from Facebook, you can use the Channel Linking API to add Messenger clients to your users.

To get started, create a user by calling the User API

curl https://api.smooch.io/v1/appusers \  
     -X POST \
     -d '{"givenName": "Rick", "surname": "Sanchez"}' \
     -H 'content-type: application/json' \
     -H 'authorization: Bearer your-jwt'

The response will include an appUserId which you can then use to call the Linking API and provide the user’s phone number.

curl https://api.smooch.io/v1/appusers/{{userID-for-created-user}}/channels \  
     -X POST \
     -d '{"type": "messenger", "phoneNumber": "+15145555555"}, "confirmation": {"type": "immediate", "message": {"role": "appMaker", "text": "Let’s connect on Messenger"}}' \
     -H 'content-type: application/json' \
     -H 'authorization: Bearer your-jwt'

The Channel Linking API will return right away. To determine if the match was successful and further know when the user has accepted your request, you'll need to listen to link:matched, link:failure and link:success webhook events. Check out the full Linking API documentation for more details.

What’s next

Channel linking is a powerful way to leverage the advantages of each channel and help users move seamlessly from one to the other. It is just one of the way Smooch helps software makers create multi-channel customer experiences with one reliable platform and API. Stay tuned, as we’ll be expanding the Channel Linking API to support even more channels in the future.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in May.

This past month, we’ve been working hard to bring you a better way to monitor all the apps you use in your Smooch account. We’re also pretty pumped to introduce a new way to interact with your customers through Facebook. As usual, you’ll notice a few updates to our API and SDKs that will make your lives easier.

What’s new 🎉

Dashboard update

We added a new homepage to the Smooch Dashboard, that way you can see all your apps at a glance and keep everything organized. Our platform is built to power messaging for all your customers via Smooch apps, so we made sure that the new experience would be speedy and facilitate working with an unlimited amount of apps.

Now, if you’re going to manage a really high number of instances, you don’t want to be clicking and scrolling to find the one you need. That’s why the dashboard now has a search bar, which allows you to find the right app quickly, all while keeping your fingers on the keyboard. We’ve implemented keyboard shortcuts around the search bar as well. For example, hitting the forward slash key (/) focuses on the search bar, you can then switch between apps with the arrow keys, and select the one you want to open with the return key.

This is just the beginning, but we think this will greatly improve workflows within Smooch.

Channel Linking for Facebook Messenger

Our Facebook Messenger channel is about to get a whole lot better: it now supports customer matching. What does that mean? If you have a customer’s phone number, you can now initiate the conversation with them on Facebook without them contacting you first.

Your message will appear in the user’s “Message Requests”. Once the customer opts-in to talk to you, their account will be linked to their Smooch user and you can start talking to them.

This is a completely new way for companies to interact with their customers on Facebook. The possibilities are endless, and we’re thrilled to support it. Get all the details on the blog

Smooch API & SDKs updates ⚙

• Update App API: We now have an Update App API to update app names but also disable our automatic credit card number masking. This setting is now available in the Create App API too.
• Facebook Call Button: You can now send call buttons on Facebook Messenger. Just use the standard tel: syntax on a link action and Smooch will translate it into Facebook call buttons.
• iOS SDK 5.6.7: Smooch iOS SDK 5.6.7 now allows you to localize date formats, update the conversation header at runtime and comes packaged with Dutch translations.

Sneak peek 👀

We have a lot of projects in store for you in the next month. It’s still very hush hush, but we’ll be adding a new SMS channel to the platform. We’re also working to allow you to do more with your users who contacted you via email. Last but not least, we’re tinkering with our popular web messenger to make it compatible with more websites. Stay tuned for more details coming soon on our blog!

Happy messaging!

Last year, Smooch became the only messaging platform that enables true cross-channel conversations through the Smooch Web Messenger.

Since then, we’ve introduced our Channel Linking API that allows developers to programmatically create these experiences by associating SMS & Facebook Messenger entities to the Smooch customer record.

Today, we’re adding the ability to add an email address to the customer record through our Channel Linking API so that conversations started on any Smooch channel can be continued over email, via Mailgun.

Why should I use it?

Continuing a conversation over email can be indispensable for channels that can’t notify the user like Web Messenger. Additionally, some users will always prefer email for certain sensitive information. For things like confirmations and receipts, email is still favored by many since you can easily archive, search or print messages.

You can also use this capability to proactively reach out to users for which you have an email address and permission to contact via email. This enables you to send a campaign or a transactional notification that can result in a conversation handled entirely through Smooch and your software. For example, if you are building a hotel management system, you can use Smooch to fire off a confirmation email, SMS and Facebook Message upon room reservation. When the user replies to this message across any of these 3 channels, your system will be able to manage the entire conversation with ease.

How does it work?

Our Channel Linking API can now take in an email address for end-users which then creates a Mailgun clients for them. Whenever a message is sent to this user, Smooch will now use this client as part of our automatic message delivery. For example, if a user starts a conversation on Web Messenger and you pass their email address to the Channel Linking API, the user will receive email replies even after he closes the browser.

To start a conversation, you can also use clients created via the Channel Linking API to specifically target Mailgun which will create a new conversation.

Getting started

You can start adding a Mailgun client to your existing user with an API call like this:

curl https://api.smooch.io/v1/appusers/deb920657bbc3adc3fec7963/channels \  
     -X POST \
     -d '{"type": "mailgun", "confirmation": {"type": "immediate"}, "address": "their@email.com", "subject": "This will be the subject of the email"}' \
     -H 'content-type: application/json' \
     -H 'authorization: Bearer your-jwt'

For a specific user identified with appUserId, we are adding a channel of type mailgun using “their@email.com” as their address. Notice the subject field, it will be used for any subsequent messages sent by email, so that a conversation stays in the same thread in the end-user’s email client. Also note that confirmation type immediate is the only confirmation type available for Mailgun.

What’s next

If you have a Mailgun integration already set up in your Smooch app, you can start adding Mailgun clients to your users today.

Apple just announced an exciting expansion to their Messages app. With Business Chat, companies all over the world will soon have an incredibly powerful way to communicate with Apple users. This new feature will effectively allow any business to add iMessage as a new customer service channel. iMessage has an incredible level of richness, allowing for buttons, pictures, video, stickers, selection menus, and even payments through Apple Pay.

Not only will Business Chat bring you a new channel with exciting customer service features, it is also integrated to a very deep level within the user experience of an Apple device - increasing the discoverability of this channel. Software developers will be able to add a contact button linked to iMessage directly into their app, but also through Safari, Maps, Spotlight, and anywhere on the Web through a link. Arguably, no other operating system or app has embedded messaging this deeply, apart from WeChat in China. iMessage Apps that were released in iOS 10 are given renewed relevance in iOS11 and with this announcement, with enhanced discoverability and a whole new platform to support business to person use cases.

The whole Smooch team is thrilled to see a brand like Apple take such defined steps towards business-to-person messaging. Business Chat is currently in developer preview, with general availability slated for 2018.

Smooch has commenced work on full support for the Business Chat developer preview, and we’ll make sure to remain in lockstep with Apple as the channel moves to become generally available. We’ll follow up with more information on our development roadmap as soon as more details emerge.

We built Smooch because we noticed a shift in how businesses and customers are looking to communicate. Both ends of the conversation want a more direct, a more human connection - with each other. Messaging is a powerful medium that is making these deeper connections possible and revolutionizing customer experience around the world.

The relationships we’ve forged while building Smooch have made us learn an important lesson: The future of messaging rests on the quality of the software that supports it. The software makers are the leaders of this movement, they are the ones embracing this way of communicating, and building on it, finding the best ways to use it.

Software makers are the trailblazers who experience first hand the challenges of an ever expanding messaging ecosystem. They are the ones who juggle with the intricacies of aligning with customer service strategies that are not only multi-channel, but also multi-platform. As their clients’ businesses grow, they also need to scale their services across the world. That makes them the perfect recipients of the breadth, power and reach of the messaging capabilities that Smooch enables.

These software makers live and die based on the quality of their software and the experience that it delivers.

Built for software businesses

And so at Smooch, we are building a platform that needs to work for entire software businesses - for the developers, the product team, the operations teams, the security teams, executive teams - all the people involved in building, delivering and operating great software.

Smooch is a platform that enables people to create conversational experiences, built on the promise of multi channel messaging. Our customers are operating strategically. They believe that conversational experiences are a critical success factor in their business, they believe that the challenges of building amazing ones is going to get harder and harder.

We are not just solving the engineering problem of dealing with the effort and complexity of building and operating multi-channel messaging, we are addressing the broader opportunity: How do I lead the market with rich conversational experiences to power my customers’ businesses?

The people dealing with these challenges everyday are software roadmap owners - product leaders, founders, executives and developers.

Introducing new pricing

Our original freemium model was designed for businesses - working on the basis that “Free users will upgrade over time”. This helped us build a great community, but didn’t help us sift out our real customers, optimize for their experience or even help committed developers onboard or build on us well. We had optimized for businesses first, developers second, and not at all for the product folk.

So that’s why we are introducing new plans and pricing, including free and trial plans to better serve software makers.

We have announced changes to our Free plan to make it truly free for makers and businesses. We want businesses to experiment on Smooch, to investigate concepts and find the value to invest in building conversational software. Our full API is now available on a free limited trial basis. Through the trial process and newly introduced guided evaluation programs, we want to engage with makers strategically. We want to share our expertise, experience and passion for conversational software.

This translates into four major commitments:

• Increased scope and coverage of our API documentation.
• New developer references, such as our SmoochDesk sample implementation.
• Increased shipping frequency for new channels.
• Our monthly product update newsletter, The Drop.

Plans for software makers

In response to the varying demands of software makers, we have introduced two plan types:

SaaS plans - for SaaS companies and ISVs building multi-tenant software—provision your customers at scale, only pay for the channels you need.

Innovator plans - for leading brands and other innovators building messaging experiences—get access to all our channels, only pay for the apps you need.

The focus of these plans reflects our investment in the critical nature of our services:

• Dashboard with enhanced enterprise features.
• Increased security and privacy compliance.
• Extended investments in scalability.
• Enhanced availability and resilience.
• 24x7x365 support for businesses that need to operate at a global scale.

Towards a conversational future

The future is conversational, and as more and more messaging platforms pervade the life of consumers and the businesses that serve them - integrating and augmenting these experiences will become a critical part of company operations. With this new future also comes the need to stay on top of conversation native tools such AI, NLP, bots, analytics and business systems. What we guarantee to our customers is much more than security and scale, we keep them a step ahead.

In spite of the massive growth and adoption in messaging across new platforms and media types, SMS retains the mantel as the messaging channel with the largest global reach and the broadest adoption by businesses. A complex SMS ecosystem continues to pose a challenge to software makers seeking messaging with global reach, reliability, low-latency and high rates of deliverability.

Today we’re pleased to announce MessageBird—one of Europe’s fastest growing communication innovators—is now integrated as a channel with Smooch.

This integration provides our customers with a new partner for global SMS coverage, high quality delivery, and with very competitive pricing. With the MessageBird launch, Smooch now supports multiple SMS integrations—enabling you to enhance resilience by adding greater diversity and redundancy to your SMS routes.

The all new MessageBird integration delivers the full range of SMS features supported by the Smooch API. With an Amsterdam HQ and 7 regional offices spanning from Singapore to San Francisco, MessageBird opens up your global SMS footprint. 900+ direct or one-hop carrier connections and an efficiency-based telco stack makes MessageBird a great solution to deliver to almost every country in the world with low latency.

With its optimized software and the consistent amount of high-volume traffic going through their platform, MessageBird offers some of the most affordable pricing options on the market.

"Our goal has always been to make communicating with customers as easy and seamless as possible. With the new Smooch integration we’re excited to offer our SMS platform to even more users." - Robert Vis, Founder & CEO

Getting started

All you need is a MessageBird account. Use your existing one or sign up here.

You can add the MessageBird integration to one of your Smooch apps with a single API call like this:

curl https://api.smooch.io/v1/apps/55c8d9758590aa1900b9b9f6/integrations \  
     -X POST \
     -d '{ "type": "messagebird", "accessKey": "i6UY1VGFh6NvyTnnt3VUnoM4F", "originator": "12262120821"}' \
     -H 'content-type: application/json' \
     -H 'authorization: Bearer your-jwt'

This call adds an integration of type messagebird to a given Smooch app. It also provides Smooch with your MessageBird accessKey, which you can get from the Developers page. An originator also needs to be provided—it’s the MessageBird number Smooch will be using to send SMS for this app. You can read our Integration API documentation for more details on this integration.

What’s next

At Smooch, our mission is to humanize the relationships between businesses and their customers. Messaging is the medium we have chosen to affect this change as we believe that it provides the most convenient and engaging way for humans to interact. As the world’s most ubiquitous messaging technology, SMS continues to play a big part in democratizing access to messaging around the globe.

We have a deep ongoing commitment to SMS as a channel, and we’ll keep working tirelessly to make it as powerful and easy to use as possible. As SMS continues to evolve towards its richer cousin, RCS, we look forward to working with experts like MessageBird to bring these capabilities to our global audience.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in June.

This was a big month for us, with a new channel to our platform, as well as a new way to link customers between channels through our API. This is all part of our larger goal of allowing your software to have the widest reach possible, while giving you more flexibility.

What’s new 🎉

Programmatic channel linking for Mailgun

When we introduced our Channel Linking API, we knew it would be an important building block to the future of messaging. That’s why we’re devoted to adding more and more channels to it.

This month we added one of the most important channels in messaging, email. It’s a critical channel for several industries, we knew it had to be a priority for us. If you have a Mailgun integration in place already, you can put this feature in action right now.

This gives you a whole different kind of interaction via email with your customers. We’ve demonstrated a use case we’re particularly excited about: A customer could start a conversation with a company on Facebook Messenger, a hotel for example, get information, book a room, and the hotel could send that customer their reservation information via email. This is just an example, but it could also be used for important notifications, sensitive information, the possibilities are extremely wide ranging.

MessageBird: New SMS channel

Despite all the innovations in the messaging space, SMS still gets it’s share of use. We’ve recently added MessageBird, the up and coming star of the European SMS scene, to our platform. Adding more SMS choice to our platform means we can give you better rates, but also broader coverage to reach more corners of the world. For more details check out the Smooch announcement and the MessageBird announcement.

Privacy Shield certification

As the messaging industry grows, the need for tighter security and privacy of conversations is growing extremely fast. Messaging is bound to host a growing amount of highly confidential information, like credit card numbers, personal identification, or medical information, securing these messages and protecting the privacy of users is on every company’s top list of priorities.

Being at the forefront of the messaging industry, it’s always been clear that Smooch would have to comply with highest level of certifications. That’s why we went through the process of acquiring the Privacy Shield certification. This program was devised by a partnership of the U.S., EU and Swiss commerce authorities, in order to achieve the highest standards of privacy during data exchanges. Acquiring certifications is only one facet of our larger commitment to security, as we are always improving the security of our infrastructure as well as revising the security model of our APIs.

Updated pricing for software makers

The messaging space is growing and evolving quickly, lead by software innovators creating conversational experiences. That’s why we have introduced new pricing plans targeted to specifically meet the challenges faced by software makers. Learn more about our focus on SaaS companies and software innovators and the thinking behind the new pricing on our blog.

Smooch API & SDKs updates ⚙

• Facebook Messenger referral info is now available in a new conversation:referral Webhook event and was added to conversation:started. Referral info is included when a user scans a parametric Messenger code or clicks on a Facebook ad

Other polishes ✨

• You can now specify multiple events when creating Webhooks from the Smooch dashboard

Sneak peek 👀

A big part of customer service is not just about exchanging text messages, but also files. We’ll be releasing a solution for this type of messages next month.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in June.

This month we’re happy to introduce a new message type to the Smooch API, enabling you to send files to end users. We’ve also added a new Attachment API, allowing you to upload files to use in future messages. You’ll notice a few tweaks to our API, iOS and Android SDKs, and an update to our Webhook retry policy.

What’s new 🎉

Send files to users

We’ve added a new message type to the Smooch API to enable you to send generic files to end users.

File messages can help remove friction during key business flows. For example, sending a PDF to sign a contract as part of a sales conversation will speed up closing that important deal. Sending a zip file that contains a new beta build will avoid the user a round trip to his storage limited email inbox.

Read more about the File message type in the API reference documentation.

Upload Attachment API

We added a new Attachment API for you to upload files that can then be used to send file, image, carousel or list messages to users. Attachments can be reused to send the same files to many users without having to re-upload the same data each time you send it. This can be very handy when crafting carousel messages that you’ll keep on reusing.

Using this API allows you to not have to worry about using your own hosting & storage. You can just trust Smooch to serve your files whenever your users needs them.

The attachment API accepts any kind of files up to 10 MB. Read more about it in the API reference documentation.

Smooch API & SDKs updates ⚙

• Our appUser schema now includes a new raw field for each client owned by a user. This new field includes all the user profile information available on a channel and is provided without any modification. See Raw client info for the complete list of provided fields for each channels.
• New SKTInitializationDidFailNotification notification for failling initialization and login calls. See Smooch iOS SDK 5.8.0 for more details.
• New conversation ViewDelegate to be notified when the SDK start another Android activity like the Camera app, Galery app, Settings apps or the Web browser. See Smooch Android SDK 4.8.0 for more details.

Other polishes ✨

We’ve updated our Webhook retry policy. If one of the webhook you configured start failing to answer Smooch, we’ll send you a warning email after 15 minutes of downtime. If failures are unresolved within 8 hours, we’ll automatically disable your webhook. Also, smooch will not retry webhook calls if your server sends back a non-recoverable error code.

We’ve put these changes in place as part of our continuous effort to make the Smooch platform even more reliable, resilient and scalable.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in August.

This month the team has been focused on many underlying platform improvements targeted at the security, scalability and performance of the Smooch platform. We also made a few updates to our SDKs and the Smooch Dashboard.

What’s new 🎊

iOS 11 support

We’re very excited about Apple launching iOS 11 (and of course new beautiful iPhones!) next week on September 12th, and we look forward to checking out the crazy impressive ARKit based apps during the keynote.

Ahead of the public launch of iOS 11, we’ve updated our iOS SDK to be fully compatible with the new operating system when you target iOS 11 for your app builds with XCode 9. You can update to the 5.8.2 version of the Smooch iOS SDK via Cocoapod or by downloading the latest version on Github.

Smooch API & SDK updates ⚙

We’ve improved Web Messenger compatibility when using Content Security Policy configurations on your server. See the release notes for more details.

Other polishes ✨

We’ve made improvements to the authentication mechanism of the Smooch Dashboard in two ways:

• Login sessions now expire after 30 days
• Accounts will now get locked for 15 minutes after 10 failed login attempts are detected over a short period of time

New integration 🔌

We’ve added Agent.ai to our growing list of third-party integrations. If you’re facing challenges scaling your support offering, Agent.ai can help you resolve your customers’ questions faster and augment your human workforce with AI-powered automation.

Sneak peek 👀

We’re working on a new major version for our iOS, Android and Web SDKs specifically developed with the high performance and scalability needs of enterprise software makers in mind. Watch our iOS, Android and Web Messenger Github repositories to get the update once available later this month.

We’re hiring 💪

We’re looking for talented Software Developers and Site Reliability and Automation Engineer to help with our efforts of building the most scalable and reliable messaging platform for enterprise software companies. We’re also on the lookout for a Business Development Director — Montreal or SF, we love you both — to help us grow even faster, and a Sales Engineer in Montreal to support our growing sales structure. If you’re interested in these opportunities and more, then we would love to hear from you.

WhatsApp is the most popular messaging app in the world with over 1 billion daily active users and is the no. 1 messaging app in 107 countries.

WhatsApp has recently ramped up its efforts to put users face-to-face with businesses as part of its strategy to monetize the platform, with the official announcement of WhatsApp Business Accounts.

With founders Jan Koum and Brian Acton on the record in their 2012 blog post 'Why we don't sell ads', there has been prolonged market speculation on how the $19 billion price tag paid by Facebook can be monetized without ads. One of the key elements of their strategy has now been laid down.

Bringing businesses to the platform is a natural evolution for WhatsApp, and one with its origin in existing demand. WhatsApp is already used unofficially by many businesses, but the move to support official accounts opens up the enterprise market - which is the real game changer here.

We want to apply what we've learned helping people connect with each other to helping people connect with businesses that are important to them. - WhatsApp Blog

With the move, WhatsApp has the potential to become the proactive and ubiquitous communication channel between businesses and consumers. This provides unique growth opportunities for the software companies that move to power these messaging experiences and, of course, WhatsApp themselves.

Introducing WhatsApp Business Accounts

"We're looking forward to making it possible for people to connect with businesses in a fast and personal way, and giving businesses the tools to make that easier to do" - Matt Idema, Chief Operating Officer, WhatsApp.

Within a closed pilot program, WhatsApp are testing a free WhatsApp Business app for small companies and an enterprise solution for bigger companies operating at a large scale with a global base of customers, like airlines, e-commerce sites, and banks. Businesses that have been linked to the program in recent press are: KLM Airlines, Net-a-Porter and in India; BookMyShow, Ola, Oyo and unnamed airlines.

How is WhatsApp's platform different?

WhatsApp has led messaging adoption through simplicity and ease of use, taking the familiar messaging paradigm of SMS, combining it with voice calls and bringing it to a global audience. It is this same simplicity WhatsApp are bringing to communications with businesses.

In the examples such as KLM, WhatsApp signals an emphasis on proactive messaging, instigated by businesses to consumers. Messages initiated by brands require strict controls to prevent abuse and spam which has led WhatsApp to manage access through a verified accounts process for businesses.

WhatsApp also requires rigorous customer opt in and, it seems, they will encourage brands to be granular with how they manage this. For example, KLM has implemented three tiers of opt in for their flight information service: one for booking confirmations, one for flight status updates and one to receive your boarding pass. This approach is designed to provide support for a broad range of use cases, while ensuring end users can block interaction for specific services without having to having to block all communications from a business.

Potential for disruption

With reach, ubiquity and simplicity WhatsApp has a potential business model that could unseat large portions of the A2P SMS market, disrupting players from telcos to cloud communications companies like Twilio.

With budgets already set aside by enterprises for SMS spend, WhatsApp could have the juice to take wallet share from existing budgets and save businesses money too.

What does it mean for businesses?

WhatsApp's approach to business messaging balances respect for the user while reflecting a belief that businesses have a role in determining the context and the needs of users when initiating communication. Key elements that support this are:

Verified accounts

Technically, businesses will be able to manage their WhatsApp Business account the same way they manage other messaging profiles. Accounts are vetted and approved by WhatsApp, then verified with a green badge. Verified accounts are designed to protect consumers from spam (and support WhatsApp's business model).

Opt in

Currently, customers have to opt in to proactive business notifications when providing their phone number in the business' website. Opt in mechanics are granular, enabling people to choose different types of communications, for example KLM has three separate consents, one for booking confirmations and check-in reminders, one for flight status updates, and one for boarding passes. Additional opt in methods outside of the web are likely to be introduced in the future.

Opt out

Blocking a contact works to stop messaging from verified accounts in the same way that blocking works throughout WhatsApp.

Why it matters to software makers?

Business to consumer messaging is exploding. In a matter of weeks, two of the biggest potential players, Apple and WhatsApp have launched new initiatives. This reflects accelerating demand from business to talk to consumers wherever they are spending time.

Reach whole new markets

WhatsApp's entry into the market creates amazing opportunities for software makers to reach new regions and audiences. For example, 85% of all people in Brazil have WhatsApp installed on their device.

Messaging is encrypted between the business and the consumer

This supports a wider range of enterprise use cases opening up opportunities to manage data flows across jurisdictions and meet use cases for banks and those with strict privacy and security requirements.

Support for proactive messaging

Proactive messaging gives businesses a lot of power (and responsibility) to initiate communications, and with it comes the potential for WhatsApp to become a trusted notification channel, rivalling SMS and email for reach.

Specific opportunities for software makers

While it is unclear what form they will take, WhatsApp have signalled support for software via APIs on top of the enterprise product. "Some businesses may use service providers to manage their messages" - Matt Idema, Chief Operating Officer, WhatsApp.

What are the benefits for end users?

For people everywhere, messaging is becoming the preferred way to interact with businesses. With Business Accounts, WhatsApp is bringing businesses to the world's most popular messaging platform. This means direct, effective communication between people and businesses when, where and how people want it.

Long lived conversations between people and businesses means more context for interactions, better quality service and easier and more timely communication. The service has been developed to protect consumers and supported by clarity throughout the user experience.

Businesses will only be able to contact people who have provided their phone number and agreed to be contacted by the business over WhatsApp.

Conversations with businesses are securely encrypted and they can easily be blocked by the user. A green badge will indicate that the business phone has been verified by WhatsApp.

How do software companies and brands get on board?

WhatsApp's official announcement was made (softly) on September 5th. Business accounts are currently only available in a closed pilot program.

There is a survey you can take to register your business' interest, but participation is selective (and limited).

"If you're interested in testing our business tools, you can fill out this survey."

We are keeping up to date with developments through our relationships at WhatsApp, and will be keeping everyone in the loop as the program expands.

More demand, more channels, more opportunities

WhatsApp has the reach and engagement to dominate business to consumer messaging globally.

But ultimately it is consumers that decide where they want to be, and where they want to talk to businesses.

The proactive nature of engagement may be one of WhatsApp's strengths but they will need to protect customers from unwanted noise in their channel. The fight to own the business to consumer relationship is on: Apple's focus on discovery gives them the edge in expanding messaging to new audiences while the established ecosystems of Facebook Messenger, Line, WeChat, Telegram and others have a head start in innovation, particularly around bots, AI and their API's.

It is certainly hard to pick winners, but one thing is clear: for global software companies and the businesses they serve, the future of customer communication involves an increasing number of messaging channels.

Today, as part of our SaaS plans, we are making our iOS, Android and Web SDKs available to software makers for distribution under your own brand.

This offer coincides with general availability of new major versions for each of our SDK's. This performance focussed release has been developed specifically with the high performance and scalability needs of leading software companies in mind: Web Messenger 4.0, Android SDK 5.0 and iOS SDK 6.0. This new breed of SDKs are powered by a set of optimized backend APIs that we have progressively deployed to production over the last few weeks.

SDKs for Distribution

Offering our SDKs as an OEM component completes the puzzle for software makers who need to offers the full gamut of messaging channels that the businesses they power need to engage with a diversified customer base.

This new capability allows you to distribute web and in-app messaging SDKs under your own brand to your customers, so that you can build software that provides access to these channels using our API.'

Our private-label offering equips you with ready-to-distribute builds of our SDKs that are rebranded at the code level to cover the full SDK API. For example, instead of Smooch.init() your SDK will be initialized with YourBrand.init(). This way Smooch lies truly under the hood.

With the package, you also receive documentation covering everything you need to know about distributing an iOS, Android and Web SDK for your customers and details on what they need to integrate into their apps and websites.

If you opt for our Enterprise plan, you’ll also get access to the full source code of the 3 SDKs via your own private Github repository.

Performance, Performance, Performance

We’ve focused this new major iteration of our SDKs on these ‘under the hood’ changes. The core of all 3 SDKs has been refactored using a new, highly optimized initialization sequence. We have fully redesigned how each SDK interacts with the Smooch platform and when key events like creating an appUser or establishing a WebSocket connection should be happening.

These optimizations result in a faster SDK initialization. For example, compared to the Smooch iOS SDK 5.x, our init sequence on 6.0 is twice as fast!

Overall, these deep changes deliver significantly reduced usage of the CPU and networking resources, - ultimately resulting in better battery life for the end-user. On the backend side, it sets our platform in a growth and scalability path upon which we can build for many years to come.

Other Improvements in Web messenger 4.0

Web messenger is also getting its own set of improvements with this release. The biggest change is that Web messenger now renders itself in a <iframe>. This delivers the following key benefits:

• Web messenger gets its own JavaScript runtime, making it compatible with 100% of web sites and Javascript frameworks (and we know there’s more than quite a few 😝 )
• Web messenger gets its own CSS context, making head scratching styling bugs nonexistent.

Following our performance focus for this release, we have also changed how Web Messenger is loaded into a website: now it’s asynchronous. This will significantly improve your website load time when including Smooch and lead to an overall snappier experience.

Upgrading

The new SDKs include a few API changes mainly around the way you initialize them. To upgrade to the latest version follow our instructions for each of the SDKs : Web Messenger 4.0, Android SDK 5.0 and iOS SDK 6.0.

If you are just starting, the Smooch dashboard will point you to use the latest versions.

What’s next

This new SDK release set us on a great trajectory for the future. You can look forward to us constantly improving and making our SDKs more powerful. We are already working on adding more rich capabilities to make it easy for you to deliver new types of messaging experiences.

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in September.

September has been an exciting month for Smooch as we’ve launched brand new versions of our SDKs to better serve the specific performance and scalability needs of leading software companies. Keep on reading for full details.

What’s new

New generation of Smooch Embeddable SDKs

We’re excited to finally release our new and improved SDKs for iOS, Android and Web.

Powered by a set of optimized backend APIs, our new SDKs allow you to distribute web and in-app messaging toolkits under your own brand so that you can build software that provides access to these channels using our API. Our brandable offering equips you with ready-to-distribute builds of our SDKs that are rebranded at the code level to cover the full SDK API. If you’re on our Enterprise pricing plan, you’ll also get access to the full source code for each SDK via your own private Github repository.

Not only are our new SDKs distributable as an OEM component, their performance has also been significantly improved. All SDKs have been refactored to use a new, highly optimized initialization sequence.

Read all the details on the improvements we’ve made to our new Embeddables on our blog. To upgrade to the latest version, follow our instructions here: Web Messenger 4.0, Android SDK 5.0 and iOS SDK 6.0.

Smooch SDK & API updates ⚙

• iPhone X Support: Right on the heels of the brand new iPhone X announcement, we perfected our conversation UI to fit Apple’s latest design guidelines. You can upgrade now to 6.1.0 to ensure you support iPhone X upon release on November 3rd 2017.

• Get business system entities API: We added a new API to retrieve all the business systems a user's conversation is connected to. This can be quite handy when you use Smooch in the context of a bot to human handover. See the details in the REST API docs

Industry intelligence 📰

WhatsApp, one of the most popular chat app at the moment, has begun detailing its plan for opening up access to business accounts. We’ve published a detailed write-up explaining in more detail what that means for software makers interested in supporting this channel in the future. Check out our full blog post for more details and stay tuned for more information on upcoming Smooch support.

Sneak peak 👀

We are working on a new mechanism to allow you to provide rich, interactive UIs across channels to create exciting new interaction patterns that were impossible to do before. We’ll be updating our SDKs and API to offer you this new capability next month. Stay tuned for a myriad of new possibilities!

The Drop is our monthly update that highlights new features and recent enhancements we’ve made to the platform, so you can easily stay informed on what’s new in Smooch. Here’s what we launched in October.

October was a huge month for Smooch. We released a new capability that we believe will change the game for software makers looking to deliver a more personal and interactive messaging experience for customers. We’ve also updated our SDKs to add image attachment previews for iOS and typing indicators for Android.

What’s new

Start building better experiences with Conversation Extensions

Let’s face it. Conversional UIs can be limiting, especially for complex transactions like completing a purchase, answering a survey, or booking an appointment. Because of technological and design constraints, these types of tasks tend to be tedious for the user – who likes to answer a never ending-list of questions? – or simply impractical within the boundaries of a chat window.

That’s where Conversation Extensions come in.

We’re super excited to introduce this new capability in Smooch. Conversation Extensions give you new real estate on top of the chat window to design more complex and delightful conversational experiences.

Put another way, we’ve just made it easier to do things like order a pizza and choose your own toppings or buy a plane ticket and then select a seat way easier (and more fun!), not just for end-users, but also for you to implement.

Conversation Extensions allow you to combine the best of conversational interfaces (like intimacy, immediacy and context-awareness) with the flexibility and power of a traditional UI. With Conversation Extensions, you’ll be able to create custom interactive experiences based on standard web technologies (HTML, JavaScript and CSS). You’ll have all the freedom and control you need to build something truly exceptional.

For example, using Conversation Extensions, you could build a hotel room reservation workflow that allows users to make a booking without ever leaving the conversation. From selecting a room type, to picking dates and paying for a purchase, Conversation Extensions allow multi-step transactions or tasks to be delivered seamlessly through an intuitive workflow, enhancing the user’s experience and increasing revenue opportunities.

Stay tuned for more info on this new capability soon. In the meantime you can get started with Conversation Extensions here.

Smooch SDK & API updates ⚙

• Image attachment previews: To prevent users from sending photos they really didn’t want to send, we’ve added a confirmation step to our iOS SDK that lets a user preview a photo before sending it from their photo gallery. Get the details here.
• Typing indicators: You can now send typing activities to our Android SDK so that users are aware when an agent is typing. Upgrade to Android SDK 5.3.0 to get this new feature.

Sneak peak 👀

Many businesses would prefer to chat with customers on their own branded channels rather than on popular messaging apps, whether for security reasons or to better control the customer experience. But brands still want their customers to be able to easily reach them anywhere.

What if you could transfer customers from one channel to another – say, from Facebook Messenger to your mobile app – while preserving the conversation history for a seamless user experience? We’re working on this capability right now and will have more details for you next month!