Sinhala and Tamil are the major languages used in Sri Lanka. Notify.lk, the SMS gateway for Sri Lanka was only supporting English language content for the SMS body. But from today, you can send Sinhala and Tamil (unicode content) in your SMS message body using our dashboard and the through our API.
Why the wait?
Yes, it was a long time since we officially launched the SMS gateway service in Sri Lanka. ???? We had to take time for testing and to support unicode content from our routes and also to develop our back-end to support unicode character counts and calculating message costs.
The difference in a unicode SMS
You were able to type 160 characters for the first page of the SMS when typing your regular English texts. But in unicode, it is limited to 70 characters. The reason is, the maximum SMS body length is actually 140 bytes and for GSM-encoded content, one character uses only 7 bits which is why you can use 160 characters. In unicode content, one character uses 2 bytes and which is why we can embed only 70 characters (140/2 bytes) to the message body.
Now using both unicode and our previously released feature Message Templates, you can do great things for your business enhancements with Notify.lk. That’s not all, we are excited that we have a more features lined-up to be released in coming weeks. Stay tuned and using our SMS gateway services for your daily business SMS requirements.
Meanwhile enjoy sending messages with your mother tongue. ????