v3.1.3: Your Employees Can Now Text, and Chat Backgrounds Become the Owner's Call
Your employees already answer the phone. Now they answer texts on the same number.
SMS, in and out
An employee with a Twilio number can now send and receive text messages as well as take calls. It is Enterprise, and there is nothing to set up.
Receiving. A text sent to your employee's number reaches it immediately, the same way a Telegram message does, and appears in the chat as an SMS card. Photos sent by MMS are saved into the employee's files and shown in the card. Every incoming message is verified as genuinely coming from Twilio, and goes through the inbound prompt-injection guardrail if you have that switched on, exactly like email and Telegram.
Sending. The employee texts from its own number, and can attach a photo or a PDF by MMS. Twilio reports back on every message, so when one fails the employee is told why and what to do about it, whether that is an unregistered US number, a country not enabled in your Twilio account, or a recipient who has replied STOP.
History. A single command lists the most recent messages in and out, with the delivery status of each.
Setup is the part we are proudest of, because there isn't any. Assigning a number to an employee now points that number's SMS at your instance automatically, and it is re-checked at every start, so adding a number later needs no restart. If the number sits in a Twilio Messaging Service with no inbound address configured, which is required for A2P 10DLC in the US, we switch that service to use the number's own webhook. Those messages were being discarded anyway. If the service is already sending its texts to another application of yours, we leave it strictly alone and Configure, then Phone, tells you exactly what to change in Twilio.
One genuine prerequisite worth knowing before you plan around it: sending SMS to US numbers requires an A2P 10DLC campaign registered in your Twilio account. That is a carrier rule, not ours.
Existing employees pick up the new commands from Skills, then Reinstall, on the phone-calls skill.
Chat backgrounds are now the owner's call
Two days ago we shipped chat backgrounds as a personal choice, where everyone who opened an employee picked their own. We have changed our minds.
The owner of an employee now chooses its background and theme, and everyone who opens that employee sees the same thing: users it is shared with, and admins who do not own it. For them, Configure then Chat background shows the owner's choice read-only, with a note explaining why, and the server will refuse a change rather than silently ignore it.
The reasoning is that an employee is a thing your team shares, and a shared thing with a different face for every person is harder to talk about, not easier. If a colleague says the card at the top of the blue conversation, you should be looking at the same conversation.
One thing to be aware of before you update: backgrounds that non-owners had set for themselves are removed in this release. If you had picked your own look for an employee you do not own, it will go back to the owner's choice. We would rather tell you that plainly than have you wonder what happened.
Calls answer immediately again
The change in 3.1.2 that held on to what a caller said while the AI was still speaking, then handed it over afterwards, was waiting for a signal from the model that usually arrives after the AI has finished talking on the line. The result was that your next answer could sit there for no reason.
It is gone, and calls behave exactly as they did in 3.1.1. Verified on real inbound and outbound calls.
The underlying problem it was trying to solve, where a caller talking over a long greeting was not heard at all, is still on our list. The cure was worse than the complaint, so it comes out until we have a version that is not.
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