Who is affected: Full-service customers
Products affected: Messaging

Changes

• New channel added to omnichannel Messaging: Email joins SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, RCS and Viber as a Messaging channel that helps you create rich and reliable communications flows with your end users. Use the channels that your end users are most comfortable with and use daily.
• Email expands your communication options to your existing end-users: Using Messaging to send emails allows you to send individualized automated messages that deliver timely information to your end-users in direct response to specific transactions, actions, or events. These transactional communications allow you to build exceptional customer experiences that foster customer loyalty, driving repeat business and heightened customer retention rates.
• Email expands your channel fallback options: In addition to SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, RCS, and Viber, email increases your automated fallback options from one channel to another. For example, if SMS fails or times out because your end user's mobile device isn't working, your message can still be sent automatically using email if email is enabled as a Messaging fallback option.
• Email allows you to promote your brand: Your emails can include your corporate or brand logo plus links to images and videos to help drive end-user engagement. Links for your logo, images, and videos must be on publicly hosted URLs.

Who is affected: Self-service customers (including trial accounts)
Products affected: Self-service portal, Intelligence

Changes

• New use case and solution tools: A new Solutions page provides you with solutions that address onboarding, account integrity, and engagement use cases that you can learn about and test.
• New product learning tools: We've added an explanation of product usage to the Intelligence product page and Q&As to provide answers to common questions about Intelligence.
• Learn more about Intelligence: You can learn more about Intelligence and common use cases for it. Articles devoted to fake account prevention and promotion abuse provide you with information on how to use Intelligence to effectively combat these two issues. You'll also find links to developer documentation for Intelligence.
• Immediately test Intelligence without code: You can use the step-by-step instructions to try Intelligence without using code. If you are a trial or self-service customer, this method is a great way to quickly learn about Telesign's Intelligence product.

Who is affected: Self-service customers (including trial accounts)
Products affected: Self-service portal, SMS Verify, Verify Plus, Intelligence

Changes

• Verify Plus enabled: All Self-service accounts can now activate the Verify Plus add-on for SMS Verify. When Verify Plus is active for an SMS Verify transaction, the send is blocked if the risk score of the phone number is too high.
• Verify Plus controls added to portal: In the Self-service portal, in your SMS Verify settings, you can now activate Verify Plus. You can choose either to enable it for all transactions or only for recipient phone numbers from specific countries.

Fixes

• None

New features

• Intelligence enabled: The Telesign Intelligence product is now available to Self-service accounts.
• Intelligence controls added to portal: A new Intelligence product page has been added to the Self-service portal; on this page you can search your Intelligence transaction history.

Additional info

• None

How this may affect you

• Decide on your blocking strategy: You can configure Verify Plus either to be active across all countries or only for a limited set of countries. You can also adjust the score threshold for blocking in the Self-service portal to be more or less strict.
• Activate Verify Plus: To take advantage of this new capability, you must turn on Verify Plus for your account in the Self-service portal. See How can I activate the Verify Plus add-on? for detailed instructions on how to activate Verify Plus.
• Adjust integration to handle Verify Plus callbacks: You can get insight into why each transaction was either blocked or allowed by Verify Plus by examining the payload of SMS Verify callbacks from Telesign when Verify Plus is active for your account. You might choose, for example, to create reporting that records how many SMS sends were blocked for each country. See SMS Verify - Screen recipients using Verify Plus for more technical details on how Verify Plus works.
• Save money: After activating Verify Plus for your account, you can avoid incurring the cost of sending SMS messages to risky phone numbers that might not belong to legitimate users. Use this add-on to mitigate the impact of bots, fake users, and fraudulent behavior.
• Add risk score evaluation to other workflows: You can adjust other parts of your system beyond SMS OTP flows to check risk scores for phone numbers (as well as other attributes) by integrating Telesign Intelligence. See Intelligence - Overview in our developer documentation to get started. You can also ingest the underlying reason codes that explain why we gave the score that we did, and use them to feed your own risk model.

Who is affected: Full-service customers
Products affected: Voice

Changes

• None

Fixes

• None

New features

• Voice now includes speech recognition, which allows use cases such as navigating through an interactive voice response (IVR) menu via voice, or collecting voice survey responses.

Additional info

• See Voice - Play audio and detect speech for more information on how to implement speech recognition when using Voice.
• How this may affect you: Speech recognition allows you to replace traditional manual inputs, simplify data entry with voice-filled forms, leverage voice commands, and convert spoken language into text. Speech recognition provides a second option to gather information from end users in addition to digit collection (DTMF).

Who is affected: Customers using Messaging with WhatsApp templates
Products affected: Messaging

Changes

• Updated WhatsApp template categories: WhatsApp has replaced its conversation categories. Conversations initiated by you are now divided into three new categories: "utility", "authentication", and "marketing". WhatsApp added a new category, "service", for all conversations initiated by the end user.
• New authentication category: If you are sending one-time passcodes (OTPs) over WhatsApp, you should now use the new “authentication” category for your custom templates instead of the old “authorization” category, which is no longer supported. Authentication now includes a button to copy the one-time passcode (OTP), making it more convenient for your end users to securely authenticate.
• Updated conversation-based pricing: Pricing has also changed, contact customer support for details. Pricing varies with the destination of the device and the conversation type. Note that Telesign uses conversation-based pricing for WhatsApp messaging, not pricing per individual message. Conversations are 24-hour message threads between you and your customers.
• Changes to the Free Conversation tier: WhatsApp has changed the 1000 free conversations per month — this will apply only to conversations initiated by the end user and will no longer include any conversations by you.

Fixes

• None.

New features

• None.

Additional info

• None.

How this may affect you

• Updated conversation-based pricing reflecting the new categories is effective June 1 and you will be charged the applicable WhatsApp pass-through fee. Contact our Customer Support Team for more information about pricing and for assistance adapting existing templates.
• You must use the new categories "utility", "authentication", or "marketing" when using templates.
  ‐ If you use WhatsApp messaging for sending one-time passcodes (OTPs), you must update your authentication templates to include copy code buttons for OTPs.
• Your authentication templates must follow certain content requirements set by WhatsApp (no media, emojis, links, or parameters over 15 characters) or your templates will be blocked by WhatsApp.

Who is affected: Self-service customers
Products affected: Self-service Portal, SMS Verify

Changes

• Telesign is pleased to announced that all self-service accounts can now use SMS Verify. You can use this service to send one-time passcodes (OTPs) to your customers as part of your customer onboarding and verification workflows. The SMS Verify product is available and easily accessible within the Self-service Portal. The SMS Verify product page also allows you to easily access the SMS Verify transaction logs in the Self-service Portal. The logs are searchable and include transactions from the past seven days. Select SMS Verify transaction logs in the Self-service Portal to view your recent SMS Verify transactions by country, phone number, Reference ID, and Status Code.

Fixes

• None

New features

• SMS Verify is now available in the Self-service portal.

Additional info

• None

How this may affect you

• You'll find that SMS Verify is a simpler and more efficient way to send OTPs than using Telesign SMS to send OTPs. All you need to do is make a request to Telesign with the end user's phone number, and Telesign can take care of generating a time-based OTP code and sending it via an SMS message. You'll also have easy access to transaction logs in the self-service portal.

Who is affected: Self-service customers
Products affected: Self-service Portal

Changes

• Phone ID transaction logs are now easier to access from the Phone ID product page in the Self-service Portal. The logs are searchable and include transactions from the past seven days. Select Phone ID transaction logs on the Phone ID product page in the portal to view your recent Phone ID transactions by country, phone number, and Reference ID. You can view each transaction's Status Code in the transaction logs.

Fixes

• None

New features:

• Phone ID transaction search

Additional info:

• None

How this may affect you:

• Faster and easier access to transaction logs in the Self-service Portal.

Products affected: SMS Verify and Verify Plus

Changes

• Telesign introduced a new version of SMS Verify. The previous version was deprecated on 3/30/23 GMT. In the new version, some features (the 229, 230, and 233 statuses and the Verify Plus packages) are returned asynchronously in the Delivery Receipt. If you are an SMS Verify customer who logged in and had blocklisting and/or Verify Plus active before 3/30/23 GMT, you are pinned to the old version to allow you enough time to plan integration changes. All other customers are pinned to the new version.

Fixes

• None.

New features

• In the new version of SMS Verify, Verify Plus uses Intelligence 2.0 which includes Intelligence's risk_insights package. The risk_insights package will provide you with additional detail explaining why Telesign issued a particular score.

Additional info

• To upgrade to the newest version of SMS Verify (and use Intelligence 2.0), reach out to our Customer Support Team. Contact our Customer Support Team if you have questions about which procedure you should use for your integration.

How this may affect you

• New SMS Verify version: The new version improves the latency for Verify Plus by 30% over the previous version. Check that your integration does not depend on parsing the HTTP response for the status codes listed above or for Verify Plus packages if you are pinned to this version. If your integration does, it needs to be changed or it may break. Intelligence 2.0 uses a different score scale which you can find on this page. See this procedure for screening recipients using Verify Plus.
• Existing SMS Verify version: If you are pinned to this version, you can continue to use your current integration but you should plan to transition to the new behavior. If you want to enjoy the advantages of Intelligence 2.0 and are pinned to the old version, you will need to either prepare to transition to the new version and ask Customer Support to switch you to the new version or ask Customer Support to upgrade you to Intelligence 2.0 and then adjust your integration accordingly. When you transition to the new behavior, check that your integration does not depend on parsing the HTTP response for the status codes listed above or for Verify Plus packages. If it does, it needs to be updated or it may break. Intelligence 2.0, which is used in the new version of SMS Verify, uses a different score scale which you can find on this page. While you remain on the old version of SMS Verify, you'll use this legacy procedure for screening recipients using Verify Plus but once you transition, you'll use this new procedure for screening recipients.

Products affected: Self-service portal

Changes

• SMS transaction logs are now easier to access from the SMS product page in the self-service portal. Select the SMS transactions link on this page to view your recent SMS transactions by country, phone number, and Reference ID. The logs are searchable and include transactions from the past seven days. More specific status codes are also included with each record.

Fixes

• None

New features

• None

Additional info

• None

How this may affect you

• Faster and easier access to transaction logs in the self-service portal to assist with troubleshooting.

Products affected: All, SMS

Changes

• None

Fixes

• None

New features

• Buy a phone number faster: You can now buy a phone number through our request form. Our team responds to these requests within 3-5 business days. (Add money to your wallet to access this feature.)
• Manage SMS settings directly from the self-service portal: From your SMS product page in the self-service portal, you can now see and edit your callback URLs, blocked countries, throttle limits, and more by selecting the "Manage settings" button. (Add money to your wallet to access this feature.)

Additional info

• None

How this may affect you:

• Enjoy these new ways to manage your account!

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NOTE:

This post was edited on 3/27/23 to link to the correct form.