Application programming interfaces geared toward text messaging have a way of being a one-way affair. Technicians are usually able to get information out of them, but it’s hard to pass them all but the most simple parameters. If you want to send more than a short message service text over an API, then you need one that let’s you program it.
Rich Text API Parameters
Conventional text messaging API calls consist of little more than the message that someone wishes to send along with the phone number they’re sending it to. Wireless carriers operate large data centers that move individual text messages through the publicly switched telephone network, which means that most API calls don’t have to be any more sophisticated than this. Growing businesses that do a great deal of work overseas will need access to a full set of international characters, which isn’t offered by something this simplistic. Those who want to include emoji and symbols in their text will run into the same kind of problems.
Perhaps the most challenging case doesn’t have to do with encoding schemes so much as it does the volume of messages being handled. More than a few libraries will buckle under the weight of anyone who tries to send a huge number of texts out all at once, so marketing specialists will want to deploy a programmable SMS API that gives them the freedom to alter parameters on the fly whenever they need to. If they suddenly have to send out a huge number of messages, then they can simply alter the underlying code so they tailor each process thread to their specific needs. Over time, many users will come up with a series of custom configurations that work best for their specific use case.
Customizing Your API Calls
High-quality programmable API calls will utilize a basic command structure that largely resembles those employed by a majority of web-based applications. This limits the need to learn a completely different programming language just to write custom calls. Nevertheless, taking some time to learn how an API formats commands is usually a good idea even if the system in question uses a self-explanatory architecture. Doing so can provide a closer look at the underlying algorithms that power the API.
Anybody who wants to start customizing their calls should take a closer look at some of the alternative protocols that they could use in place of the standard ones. Implementing an API that supports the use of the timed text media format can enable users to include video or audio information on top of the standard written data that they’re sending. Additional support for eight and sixteen-bit Unicode points can help to give access to even more characters than most users would have otherwise been able to. Companies that have to do business with customers all over the world may also wish to explore ways to connect their APIs with a text gateway that connects email and text portals together.
Jacking Into Advanced Text Services
Gateways, and other similar technologies, work by associating a wireless subscriber’s phone number with an inbox. Whenever a message gets sent to said inbox, wire centers connected to the PSTN will convert it into a text. Authors of marketing APIs can leverage this connectivity by linking their email promotions with a text message app. Some customers might prefer receiving messages one way or the other, so this offers marketers an extra degree of choice when picking out the best way to contact a specific individual. Customer service representatives could even author their own custom plugins that give them the freedom to mix email, SMS texts and several other technologies together seamlessly. Sending a message with this kind of system would merely require the user to pass a message as a parameter to an outside call, which would then automatically get sent out using the most appropriate pathway for the type of message in question.
Once programmable text APIs are in place, they’re extremely easy to use. Tech-savvy marketing and customer service representatives will quickly find that they can use their new tools in any number of ways once they get over the initial deployment hurdles.
