This is the first installment of a third cadence slot. The announcement-cadence hub defined a weekly This week in Orbit entry and a monthly Orbit release notes recap; this post adds the quarterly review — one post per quarter that wraps the quarter's shipped work in a single page, grouped by channel. Like the monthly slot, everything below is live today and each item traces back to a dated entry on the canonical changelog. Q2 2026 covers April, May, and June.
AI voice
Three dated entries define the quarter's voice work.
The voice stack went end to end. The Softphone (SIP edge), inbound routing, ring groups, and calendars all shipped in one pass, so inbound numbers route through a fully configured path — seven destination types including ring group, queue, IVR, and AI agent — with holiday calendars that switch routing automatically.
Agents moved into the browser. A browser softphone lets agents make and receive live calls from any dashboard tab — no plugin or desktop client to install. Mid-call controls shipped alongside it: DTMF inject, a recording toggle mid-call, full call-history export, and a per-call cost breakdown in the call detail record.
Voice-to-video escalation reached the API. A live voice call can now be elevated into a video room through a documented endpoint, so SDK integrations can pick it up rather than reconstructing it.
SMS
Routing, done per number. Per-number provider routing, shared alpha senders with best-delivery country selection, and admin-configurable platform markup shipped across all SMS paths — routing becomes a per-number decision instead of a provider default.
Inbound SMS fixed for every owned number. Mobile-originated (inbound) SMS from any purchased number now reaches the correct tenant inbox — previously only numbers in a narrow provider subset matched. Every owned number now delivers inbound, and the fix holds across every provider you own numbers through.
A dedicated gateway. A purpose-built SMPP gateway handles high-throughput SMS send and receive with carrier-grade session management, replacing ad-hoc provider library connections.
Deliverability moved from checked-once to checked-continuously: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your sending domains are validated by a daily health run, with a test-send and file attachments on outbound email. Senders see your domain health drift before deliverability pays for it.
Video
Video rooms can now require end-to-end encryption. Enable E2EE at room creation and every participant's audio and video is encrypted in the browser before it leaves the device — the media server relays ciphertext only and never holds the plaintext key. Regulated-team calls, the ones that need more than transport encryption, get it.
Platform and billing
Not everything fits a channel; the rest of the platform moved too.
SDKs across eleven languages. An npm-publishable Node SDK ships alongside the wider eleven-language SDK set, and a new MCP server puts Orbit's API surface in front of AI clients like Claude and Cursor.
A sandbox, before production traffic. A dedicated developer sandbox with test API keys lets you exercise the whole platform end to end — no real traffic, no charges — before you point it at live numbers.
Billing you can read. Auto-top-up with configurable thresholds, a spend forecast showing days remaining at current burn rate, and a filterable transaction history; underneath it, every credit movement writes a permanent ledger entry and a background sweep automatically releases billing holds on calls that ended without a terminal event.
The quarterly convention
One post per quarter, named Orbit quarterly review — <quarter> <year>, tagged quarterly-review so the class is machine-identifiable alongside the weekly and monthly slots. Each review covers shipped work only, grouped by channel, with a platform-and-billing section for what does not fit a channel. The cadence hub post now lists all three slots; the canonical history stays at the changelog either way.
Next installment: Q3 2026.