Introduction to the Course

People need to communicate with each other to accomplish their daily tasks. This communication can be academic, professional, or simply social. With the advancement of technology, communication has evolved to be quicker and more frequent by being transmitted over different media, such as email, SMS, voice, or video.

Conversations are happening everywhere, from academia and e-commerce to transportation and online appointment systems. Depending upon the nature of the work, different people need to converse with different audiences. For example, students need to speak with their professors, and customers need to interact with business owners.

This communications workflow requires an intelligent and efficient service that enables us to carry out these conversations hassle-free. Twilio is a great tool to make these conversations easier. In this course, we’ll learn about how Twilio enables us to:

• Converse with our audience by sending and receiving text messages and making and receiving phone calls.

• Perform various communication functions using its web service APIs.

What is an API?

An API is a software gateway that allows different software components to communicate with each other. It helps expose the capabilities of an application to the outer world, allowing for programmatic access to the application’s data.

Consider the case of a service like Twilio that provides communication APIs for different media. Building and exposing an API for this service will allow others to programmatically fetch the service’s data to perform certain functions, such as verifying users.

Many popular services like YouTube, Reddit, and Google Maps also provide APIs for extended use cases. These services allow authorized clients to access their provided resources.

Prerequisites

This course requires a basic understanding of APIs and fundamental knowledge of the JavaScript programming language.

Intended audience

This course is intended for anyone who wants to learn how to use and integrate communication APIs. In this context, you can be:

• A student who is new to the world of APIs and wants to learn their basic usage.

• A professional who has ample experience working with other communication APIs and wants to explore Twilio.

• An organization that wants to integrate Twilio for its internal and external communication.