📦 A missed delivery SMS can create a lot more headaches than a missed notification... and sometimes, the problem isn't the courier. It's the phone number. Invalid numbers, formatting errors, and landlines mistaken for mobile numbers can mean missed delivery updates, more "Where Is My Order?" (WISMO) calls, and frustrated customers. In her latest Vonage Developer Blog post, Amanda Cavallaro shares how to prevent these issues with two simple steps: ✅ Sanitize: Normalize phone numbers to E.164 format using the Vonage Identity Insights API. ✅ Validate: Confirm the number is a valid, SMS-capable mobile line before hitting send. The best part? Both steps happen in a single API call, using live operator data instead of outdated lookup tables. 🌍 Make sure your messages reach the right customers, starting with the right phone numbers. 📲 See how to put the Vonage Identity Insights API to work. 👇 🔗: vonage.dev/487csX2

💜 Office Hours are back! We're kicking off the next season on the 5th of November, at 3pm UK time with a new host: Julia Biro. This is your chance to get in touch with our DevRel team, ask questions and learn something new. Richard and Michael will join for this first edition as guests to answer all your Video API questions and beyond. Schedule and more details below 👇

🌉🌴 2 cities + 2 weeks = endless connections and unforgettable @Techweek_ moments! 🚀 Across San Francisco and Los Angeles, we hosted and co-hosted events that brought together founders, developers, and investors to connect, share ideas, and explore what's next for Voice AI. Here's a look at some of the highlights: 🚶 TechWalk (SF + LA): We kicked off both weeks with the TechWalk community at Crissy Field in SF and Santa Monica in LA. No slide decks, no agendas. Just great conversations, fresh air, and even better company. 🎙️ Voice AI with @DeepgramAI (SF + LA): Two packed sessions featuring live demos, real-world deployment insights, and conversations about what it takes to bring Voice AI into production. We loved seeing so many of you there! 🏙️ APIs, Aperol & A Rooftop Social (LA): Our rooftop gathering in Santa Monica brought together guests from a16z, @GoogleStartups, AWS, @CloudflareDev, Red Bull Ventures, @uncorkcap, and more for an evening of great conversations and new connections. 💡 VC Reverse Pitch with Founders & Funders (LA): Flipping the traditional pitch format! Investors took the stage to share their investment theses with founders, creating a unique opportunity to connect and explore what's next. A big thanks to Founders & Funders for partnering with us! 🥐 Founders' Breakfast with @alumniventures (SF): Good coffee, great company, and meaningful conversations with pre-seed to Series A founders. The perfect way to bring the startup community together. A huge thank you to our partners and everyone who joined us, shared ideas, and made these two weeks so memorable. 💜 See you at the next one. 🌟 #SFTechWeek #LATechWeek #VonageAPI #VoiceAI #StartupProgram #TechWeek2026

Last week, we hosted our first mini hackathon at AI Campus Barcelona! 🙌 Ops Apps That Talk Back brought together builders, operators, and tinkerers for an evening with one goal: use @softr_io and the Vonage Messages API to build and launch a working ops app in under two hours. And our hackers absolutely delivered! 💜 Projects included an employee onboarding tracker, a rewards tool for in-person commerce events, an expense tracker connected to WhatsApp, and more. All built from scratch in just one evening by the people who would actually use them. The event marked two exciting firsts: our first collaboration with Softr and our first event at AI Campus Barcelona. And we're just getting started! 🚀 We were also thrilled to welcome a special guest, @mariam_hakobyan, Co-Founder & CEO of Softr, who joined us for the evening. A huge thank you to everyone who helped bring this event to life: 👉 @KarlLingiah – for bringing the Vonage developer energy 👉 @frankopazo1 – for partnering with us to make this experience happen 👉 Vincent Jong – for creating a space in Barcelona where builders can turn ideas into reality More to come. 🌟

We loved welcoming @vcodersglobal London to the Vonage office for their first meetup with us! 🎉 The theme? AI 101: A Beginner's Guide to Understanding - cutting through the jargon to explore the strange, powerful, and wildly misunderstood systems behind today's AI boom. Exactly the kind of conversation we love being part of. A huge thank you to our guest speakers from MFT, Artem Matiash and Alex Smyrnov, for making a complex topic so engaging and approachable. And a special shoutout to organizers Erika Tsai and Sofiia Matsiutsia for bringing this community together in our office! 🙌 Here's to more great conversations, new connections, and evenings like this one. 💜✨

Building an AI voice agent is one thing. Making it ready for the real world is another. 🎙️🤖 In his latest tutorial, our Developer Advocate Benjamin Aronov takes the Vonage + Deepgram Voice Agent beyond the basics with the tools and guardrails that make it genuinely useful: ✅ Live order status lookups ⏱️ Hard timeouts for slow APIs 🛟 Reliable fallback responses 📞 Seamless handoffs to a human agent 📋 Call logging to learn and improve over time The order backend is mocked, but the pattern is ready to plug into your own database or API. This is how you build voice AI that's production-minded from day one. 🔗 vonage.dev/4B9xEcp #VoiceAI #AIAgents #VoiceAPI #Deepgram #Developer

Don't miss out on today's episode of TheDevRel Show!

@writethedocs London If you care about giving your readers an awesome documentation experience, this meetup is for you! We recently welcomed them to the London office to share our Documentation Team's journey in building the Vonage Learning Pathways.

@codurance is a global software engineering consultancy, headquartered in the UK, helping businesses unlock trapped value in legacy software by modernizing systems and software delivery with AI-accelerated engineering and agent-ready architectures. But what sets Codurance apart is its roots. Founded on the principles of software craftsmanship, its co-founders started the first and largest Software Craftsmanship community in Europe, and that mission hasn't stopped. Today, Codurance's Craftspeople run regular meetups and hands-on workshops, helping engineers get better at building quality software. The result? A community of 13,000+ members across the UK, Spain, Portugal, Brazil, the USA and online.

Networx London is a business and professional networking community connecting 19,000+ entrepreneurs, founders, business owners, investors, and professionals through in-person events across London. We bring together people from different industries and professional backgrounds to create meaningful connections, exchange ideas, and discover new opportunities. Vonage hosted our first event with Networx London in August, where Jim Seconde talked us through how to avoid the pitfalls of AI Slop.

@BimpeAI runs the AI Agents Academy, where London’s AI builders come together for hands-on Agentic AI Hack Nights. This is not another panel-heavy meetup. It’s a vibecoding session where developers, founders, and builders ship real agent workflows in one evening, then demo them live to a panel of expert judges. Vonage hosted our first Agentic AI Hack Nights in July 2026

🤝 Better things happen when we work together. Our Partnership Program brings us together with companies and organizations across the industry that are doing great things to create new opportunities, share ideas, and strengthen our communities. We’re spotlighting some of the fantastic members helping make that possible, starting with:

SF Tech Week, you were a blast! 💜🌉 We had great conversations, made new connections and ate well ( loved breakfast with the community 🥐), all in all it was an incredible week! Huge thanks to everyone who joined us and made it so memorable. And we're not slowing down! Next stop: LA @Techweek_! 🌴 Here's where you can find the Vonage Developer crew next week: 🚶Monday: Kick things off with a Walk & Talk 📊 Tuesday: Join us and Founders & Funders for a VC Reverse Pitch 💬 Wednesday: Connect with fellow developers and founders at APIs & Aperol 🎙️ Thursday: Dive into Voice AI with Vonage and Deepgram Building something exciting? Be sure to connect with our Startup Program Manager, @AutumnPenaloza to learn how Vonage can support your startup. LA, we'll see you soon! 🚀 👇 Find the event details and sign-up links below. vonage.dev/TechWeek2026 #LATechWeek #DeveloperCommunity #Startups #VoiceAI

🔗 More details here -> vonage.dev/4746uWG

Your JSON schemas could be adding a hidden tax to your AI bill. 💸 Our team at the Vonage AI Center of Excellence noticed token usage was consistently higher than expected, even on short prompts. The culprit? JSON schema overhead. We put it to the test across Gemini 2.5 Flash, Gemini 3.5 Flash and Claude Haiku 4.5. The results stood out: 👉 A medium-complexity schema on Claude Haiku 4.5 added 71% to the input token bill on a 100-token prompt 👉 Gemini 2.5 Flash used 186 tokens vs. 1,189 on Claude for the same deeply nested schema 👉 Across millions of API calls, that “hidden tax” can quickly become a real cost driver The good news: there are ways to cut the overhead. From trimming unnecessary schema fields to choosing the right model for your workload, Nimrod Taiblum shares practical ways to keep those hidden token costs in check in our latest blog. 👇 #AI #MachineLearning #Tech #AIExplained #TechEducation

🥐 Fueled up the Tech Week participants for the exciting rest of the week! Thank you for joining us 💜

Get started with our developer guide 👇 🔗 vonage.dev/4xVAQWi

Skip the weeks-long RCS approval wait. 👀 The Vonage Verify RCS Default Agent lets you send rich verification messages with one-tap OTP codes - today, with zero new setup. ✨ Rich card layout ✨ One-tap copy code ✨ Carrier-verified sender ✨ SMS fallback built in One tiny API change. Big upgrade. 🔐 #RCS #Vonage #VerifyAPI

Full recap by our Developer Advocate, James Seconde 👇 vonage.dev/47tzuqS

Happy 31st Birthday, PHP! 🎂🐘 31 years of powering the web - and the momentum has never been stronger! 💪 We caught #PHPVerse, and the state of PHP in 2026 is honestly impressive: ✅ PHP Foundation driving security, growth & community ✅ WordPress running 40% of the web with a modern glow-up ✅ Symfony using AI agents for releases ✅ Composer locking down supply chain security Here's to 31 more years of building amazing things. 🚀