A single curly quote, em dash, or ellipsis can double your SMS costs. When Unicode characters appear in a message, the entire SMS switches from GSM-7 encoding (160 characters per segment) to UCS-2 encoding (70 characters per segment). Most senders do not realize this is happening until they see unexpected billing. Telnyx Smart Encoding solves this by automatically replacing common Unicode characters with their GSM-7 equivalents before sending.
Smart Encoding analyzes outbound SMS messages and replaces 200+ Unicode characters with compatible GSM-7 alternatives. Curly quotes become straight quotes. Em dashes become hyphens. Ellipses become three periods. Your message looks the same to recipients, but sends at the lower GSM-7 rate.
Via Mission Control Portal:
For API configuration details and per-message controls, refer to our developer documentation.
