While using Twilio Inc.’s communications APIs is much easier for developers than implementing VoIP functionality from scratch, enabling long-distance calls across different devices and browsers can still be a challenge. The vendor set out to ease the task today by launching a new analytics service called Voice Insights that promises to help pinpoint the technical issues responsible for drops in audio quality.

Its main selling point is a real-time diagnostics mechanism that can be configured to give users troubleshooting advise when echoes, jitter or some related problem is detected during a call. If, for instance, poor mobile coverage is causing a conversation to be repeatedly interpreted, Voice Insights is able to notify the affected party that they should to move somewhere with better reception. And the service similarly springs into action when a user accidently mutes their microphone and needs to be alerted to the mistake before carrying on with what they were saying.

After triggering the appropriate notification, every incident is logged to a backend analytics dashboard along with other diagnostics data that enables developers to find problem patterns in their apps. Voice Insights can correlate device metrics with support tickets to speed up troubleshooting, identify long-term call performance trends and pinpoint the operational conditions that cause the most issues. The latter feature is designed mainly to help large companies optimize the deployment of communications services across their geographically distributed operations, a task that involves things like selecting the carrier with the most reliable network.

Voice Insights is meant to complement Twilio’s WebRTC-based communications APIs, which received another boost earlier today after the vendor announced that it acquired the team behind the popular Kurento WebRTC media server. The deal doesn’t include the platform itself since it’s been open-sourced a while ago, but it does buy Twilio a group of seasoned VoIP developers along with a set of proprietary video processing technologies.

The company will bake the software into its videoconferencing service to provide better support for advanced enterprise use cases and emerging consumer trends like augmented reality. Twilio also mentioned robotics and the connected universe among the areas where it’s looking to put the technology to use. According to the official acquisition announcement, the Kurento team will join the vendor’s ranks to lead the integration effort.

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