PHLO - Visual Communication Builder for Your Voice and SMS Apps

15 Apr 2019

In this age of agile development and rapid prototyping, no one wants to spend weeks building communication applications. In our continuous endeavor to simplify business communications, we created a whole new way of building communication apps — Plivo High-Level Objects. PHLO drastically reduces coding time and cuts integration steps, thereby helping developers design collaboratively, build visually, and deploy quickly — and now it’s available in general release.

We’ve added several features to PHLO to enhance how workflows can interact with your data.

The HTTP request component offers more authentication options and support for static and dynamic URLs make interaction with your APIs or third-party resources easy.
With the HTTP request component, you can parse multilevel JSON files to interact with larger and more complex data.
The branch component now automatically typecasts variables when comparing to ensure variables are correctly processed and help you build better logic for your workflows.
You can now assign PHLOs to subaccounts and have one PHLO trigger another, which helps with account management and application logic.

Fortified for scale and uptime

PHLO eases the way for you to deploy and maintain communication applications. You don’t host your apps, we do. This convenience for you comes with added responsibility for us. We’ve engineered for reliability, quality, and 99.95% uptime to make sure your applications scale with ease.

Server-side SDK and debugging

We’ve added more ways to control your PHLO with API requests. You can now trigger your PHLO application via an API request using our SDKs in all supported languages. The multiparty call component has multiple triggers to asynchronously modify the states of the members on the call. You can now add members to a call and make state changes like mute, unmute, transfer, and disconnect a member using a Plivo SDK.

In addition, we’ve added more visibility on application logs in your account to provide better debugging and error correction.

A better way to build communication apps

With PHLO, every action is a component: phone menus, prompts, SMS menus, conference bridges, call forwarding, SMS notifications. These components, packaged as templates, drastically reduce the number of lines of code required to create custom business logic. You can add your own custom code and create unique communication applications for your business with 80% less code.

Unlike visual application builders that only automate simple workflows for a limited set of use cases, PHLO provides 100% functional parity with Plivo APIs and XML, enabling use cases from simple ones like order notifications to complex ones like a full-featured call center. PHLO also simplifies the integration and deployment pipeline so that you can ship more code faster.

PHLO runs on Plivo’s cloud infrastructure. This lets you focus on your actual business use case, rather than worrying what’s under the hood.

Getting started with PHLO

The best way to get started is to sign up and create your first PHLO. PHLO has everything you need to create your app in minutes. We’ve also put together a collection of use case video tutorials to get you started quickly.