Announcing PHLO, a Visual Workflow Design Tool for Communications Applications

Aug 10, 2018

Developers innovate at a fast pace. To help developers build voice and text messaging communication into applications, we’re unveiling the public beta of PHLO (Plivo High-Level Objects), a new visual way of integrating communications that empowers developers to design collaboratively, build visually, and deploy instantly.

PHLO offers:

Prebuilt use case templates with option to add custom code
100% functional parity with Plivo APIs and XML
Serverless architecture, hosted on Plivo infrastructure

And to top it off, PHLO is free for all Plivo customers.

Why it matters

Although communication APIs have simplified the process, building communication capabilities into business applications is still a complex task for developers. We saw a need to simplify it.

PHLO takes a visual drag-and-drop approach to building communication applications. It lets you build applications by connecting together graphical components in much the same way you’d piece together Legos.

Building with PHLO is visual and intuitive. PHLO eliminates the need to keep referring back to documentation, since text-based help is available within the main workspace.

With PHLO, tasks are components: phone menus, prompts, SMS menus, conference bridges, call forwarding, SMS notifications. These components, prepackaged as templates, drastically reduce the code required to create custom business logic. PHLO works seamlessly with all programming languages and is prepackaged within Plivo Server SDKs. You can still add your own custom code and create a unique communication application that’s relevant for your business — just now you can do it with 80% less coding.

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

PHLO runs on Plivo’s cloud infrastructure. Because it’s hosted, you can focus on your business use case rather than worrying about all the stuff under the hood, such as setting up a server and writing code for routing and API calls.

Getting started with PHLO

The best way to get started with PHLO is to sign up for Plivo (if you’re not already using it) and try it. PHLO has everything you need to create an application in minutes. We’ve also put together a collection of use case video tutorials to get you started quickly.

We also have plenty of documentation, in the form of a PHLO getting started guide and detailed use case guides.

One last thing — the pricing :)

At Plivo, our aim has always been to simplify integrating communications for developers. Sometimes, all we need to do is to unblock things for developers so that they can change the world. That’s why, in addition to offering 100% Plivo API support out of the box, we’re also making PHLO free. This is not just a commercial decision. This is our stake in the ground — we believe this is how the communication capabilities of the future will be built.

Have questions? Get in touch with an expert and request a live demo.

Check out our launch announcement at Product Hunt and leave your feedback.