A new free API (apiphonenumber.com) is available to validate international phone numbers.
This API was designed to improve on Google’s libphonenumber, a popular service for phone validation. Libphonenumber requires both a phone number and the country code.
It was originally built to solve a common problem in the travel industry : booking confirmations via SMS or text were not getting delivered. Travel and hospitality is an industry is global by definition. Each booking center for train, airline, hotel, car rental optimizes its customer acquisition by reducing the client on-boarding forms to their bare minimum. The data is consolidated into a global distribution systems (GDS) and hotel property management systems (PMS). Up to 10% of the phone numbers will end up either poorly formatted, or formatted as a local phone number.
This new API takes as input the contact’s personal name (given name and family name) and the phone number (possibly in a local format). Then it returns a verified phone number in E.164 international phone number formatting.
For those 10% poorly formatted phone numbers, NamSor’s API Phone Number validates and verifies about 95%-99% of them. What’s the magic ? The machine learning framework combines both the personal name’s likely country of origin or ethnicity, as well as the phone number formatting (if there is a ‘plus’ sign, if there are parenthesis, how many spaces, how many meaningful digits etc.)
This free API supports Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) and is delivered over HTTPS so it’s fully secure and can be easily integrated. It supports OpenAPIv3, comes with a SDK and a command line interface (CLI). It’s covered by NamSor’s strict privacy policy and data protection agreement (DPA). The API is free to process up to 450 phone numbers per month.
You can try it online at https://apiphonenumber.com/