Introducing Vapi SMS

We’re excited to announce that Vapi now supports SMS.

AI agents are no longer locked into a single modality.
Your voice agents can now send and receive text messages - out of the box.

Voice is powerful, but real-world conversations often need more: A confirmation code. A link to a reservation. Directions to a location. A quick follow-up without needing to stay on the line.

Vapi SMS makes that seamless.

What’s New

Your agents can now:

Send outbound SMS messages during a call
Receive and respond to incoming SMS messages live, even while on a call
Switch from voice to text mid-conversation when the user stops speaking and starts typing.
Support fully text-based flows for cases where voice doesn’t make sense.

It’s a big step toward making Vapi agents feel truly multimodal and more aligned with how people actually communicate.

How to Use It

Right now, SMS is available for Twilio only. Here’s what you need to get started:

Create a Twilio number
If you're based in the US, register for A2P 10DLC or verify a toll-free number on Twilio to enable SMS messaging
Inside the Vapi dashboard, use "Import Phone Number", and enter your Twilio SID, token, and number.
Go to the Vapi Dashboard → Tools → Create Tools → Send Text.
Update your assistant’s tools to include the send text tool.
Include the tool’s name in your system prompt.
You're done. Your Vapi agents can now read and write SMS in the same session as voice

Check Docs for full setup instructions and examples.

Why We Built This

We wanted to make your voice AI agents more versatile, responsive, and usable across more real-world environments like healthcare clinics, delivery fleets, and retail floors.

This SMS layer adds fault tolerance and flexibility to your existing flows, and unlocks new ones, like:

Confirm appointments silently: “Reply YES to confirm”
Collect structured input during a call: “Text the serial number”
Recover from dropped calls or poor audio via fallback SMS
Operate entirely over text in low-connectivity or high-noise environments

This feature is all about coverage, continuity, and control to let users stay in flow, no matter where or how they’re communicating.

What’s coming next

This is just the beginning.

We’re actively working on supporting more providers and deeper SMS tooling - including rich media (MMS), automatic message templates, and multi-channel conversation history across voice and text.

For now, Twilio gets you everything you need to build and test.
Great conversations aren’t limited to one format.

Let’s build something real together