What is Azure Communication Service (ACS) ?
ACS provides SDK & APIs to allow SMS, Video/Voice calling, and Telephony (Inbound and outbound calls to a phone).
It's built on Azure, meaning ACS takes advantage of all the A.I. capabilities, infrastructure, scalability and security Azure provides! ACS is HIPAA compliant and is working towards to be GDPR compliant by the end of 2022.
ACS provides rich communication APIs which you can leverage inside your new and/or existing apps . For example, you can create custom apps on top of Teams and allow people to join Teams meeting without having the caller the need to download yet another app. (Yes, even if it's an essential app like Teams 😉 )
Why ACS?
We all know with COVID we've come to embrace a "new norm". Remotely visiting doctors for consultations and even for basic interaction. One of the biggest hurdle for remote visits and conferences are people needing smart phones or computuers and download specific apps to join these meetings.
By using ACS we can eliminate that barrier to entry and start to cater to the demographics who aren't exposed to the same technologies that we are familiar with. Could that be our parents? Grandparents? What about those who are in places that do not have a smartphone? Or places without data-enabled network?
We can start to understand the potential reach with ACS!
Here are some QuickStart you can start to try on your own! If you have questions as you go through this please feel free to comment below!
Add Voice Calling - Quickstart - Add voice calling to your app - An Azure Communication Services quickstart | Microsoft Docs
Add Video Calling - Quickstart - Add voice & video calling to custom Teams client - An Azure Communication Services quickstart | Microsoft Docs
Receive SMS in your app - Quickstart - Send an SMS message - Azure Communication Services | Microsoft Docs
I'm so excited for this service and can't wait to see how it grows! Please keep an eye out for a lot more ACS related content 🙂
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