We’re excited to announce that Azure Communication Services is now generally available. Developers can easily add chat, voice calling, video calling, traditional telephone calling, SMS messaging, and other forms of real-time communication to their applications using the same services and technologies that power Microsoft Teams. Interoperability into Microsoft Teams is also supported (in preview).
We recently showcased Azure Communication Services at Microsoft Ignite. To see how these services work together, watch the sessions below:
In this article, we want share high-level scenarios that can be built using Azure Communication Services and how these scenarios are reflected in the design of our SDKs for a variety of platforms.
Azure Communication Services provides libraries for mobile apps, desktop, and web, so you can reach a broad audience.
As a fully managed communication platform that enables developers and organizations to securely build communications features and connected user experiences across applications running on any device, Azure Communication Services offers the following core services:
Our SDK’s supported platforms reflects the type of applications you can build. For SMS you can only build service apps, while Chat allows you to build both service and client apps. Calling is currently supported only for clients. SMS and Chat also have published REST interfaces that you can access directly over the Internet.
LANGUAGES AND PUBLISHING LOCATIONS |
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JavaScript |
.NET |
Python |
Java SE |
iOS |
Android |
Chat |
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SMS |
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Calling |
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Identity |
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Reference Documentation |
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Communication can occur between people but also between people and computers (bots). You may be building apps for enterprises where Azure Active Directory/M365 identity is pervasive or building apps for consumers using Facebook or another authentication provider; for these reasons we want to help you build sophisticated apps that reach the broadest possible audience and provide an easy way to handle that process.
To support this flexibility we built a simple, lightweight identity framework that is published through the Identity namespace and SDK:
You can get more details about the identity and token management and other architecture information in our conceptual documentation.
Azure Communication Services creates and manages two key Azure resources:
The combination of these capabilities is especially suited to ISV scenarios. For example, if you are building a contact center platform for external organizations, you can create Azure Communication Services resources and acquire phone numbers programmatically as part of customer on-boarding.
Adding communication capabilities to apps and low-code workflows is a continuing project for our team. Right now, these are some popular ways to extend Azure Communication Services:
These tools can be combined with a variety of Azure and Microsoft Graph capabilities to create sophisticated workflows, for example:
We hope this was a valuable technical introduction to Azure Communication Services and what you can use today to build and ship rich communication experiences.
If you want to learn more and get started, here are some quick links to our official documentation:
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