AT&T announced availability of two new APIs, intended to enable developers to integrate advertising and messaging features to apps.

The company also revealed enhancements to its speech API, powered by its Watson speech recognition engine, to provide developers with improved speech-to-text and text-to-speech capabilities.

The advertising API is described as a “cross platform, cross carrier” tool which enables developers to monetise apps using in-app, paid advertising, with an 80/20 revenue split driven by the number of ads a user clicks.

Among the features supported are definition of the category, placement, context and delivery of ads; optimisation based on device used; support for demographic parameters to increase engagement; and provision of yield management and reporting tools.

The new messaging API will allow developers to send text and picture messages from their AT&T mobile numbers without exiting an app. The company said that having messages sent from the phone number “allows friends and family to easily recognise the sender, improving the in-app messaging experience”.

The optimised AT&T speech API has been enhanced through the addition of additional speech contexts tuned for gaming and social media apps. It also offers a generic context, which can be customised for certain words used specifically within an app.

It also gains text-to-speech capabilities in both English and Spanish.