Some 1.6 million developers use Twilio Inc.’s namesake cloud platform to provide communications features such as voice calling in their applications. Now, the company hopes to grow that number even further by bringing nontechnical professionals into the fold.

Twilio today unveiled a new service that provides the ability to take advantage of its communications features without writing any code. Dubbed Twilio Studio, the tool offers access to prebuilt “widgets” that each expose a different capability in the form of a graphical building block. These widgets can be dragged onto a visual canvas and chained together to create a communications workflow.

Contact center managers looking to streamline support calls, for example, might use Twilio Studio to build custom voice menus. They could set up a prompt that asks customers to specify the nature of their inquiry and have the platform automatically direct them to the appropriate department.

For more advanced projects, companies can add custom code to complement the pre-built widgets. This is facilitated by integration with the recently introduced Twilio Functions service. It enables developers to run scripts without having to spend time on configuring the underlying environment.

Custom code is made accessible through a “Run Function” widget that works with the same drag-and-drop controls as the default lineup. By providing a graphical interface for creating communications workflows, Twilio Studio aims to help companies roll out new features and react to operational changes faster. It should also free up time for development teams by enabling non-technical personnel to take over a good portion of the work.

Twilio Studio isn’t quite up to par with Twilio’s main programmatic controls, however. TechCrunch reported that the platform’s video communications features are not supported on launch, although this may very well change in the future.

Twilio Studio is currently in preview. It’s set to become available for $99 per month plus a half-cent per workflow execution.

Image: Twilio