If you implemented a video calling application using the Twilio Programmable Video API, you may find that during a call you want to share textual information with the other participants. This could be a link to a document, or even a reaction emoji. In this article you are going to learn how to take your video application to the next level by adding a chat room with the Conversations API.

Tutorial requirements

This is the third article in my series of Programmable Video tutorials, so we are going to take advantage of the video chat application built in the previous two installments and add the chat room feature to it. This application uses a vanilla JavaScript front end and a Python back end. To run this application on your computer you need the following requirements:

• Python 3.6 or newer. If your operating system does not provide a Python …

Xiang Xu from VOYCE joins us today for this guest post on how to add VOYCE’s interpreter capabilities to a telemedicine waiting room and video chat app.

VOYCE provides remote video interpretation services to the health care, legal, and business communities. Our professional, qualified, and medically trained interpreters service 220+ languages and dialects. Our platform can tightly integrate with Twilio Programmable Video and Programmable Voice.

This post will show you how to add VOYCE’s interpretation services to a Twilio Programmable Video telemedicine room. A medical provider can add an interpreter to the room with a single click of a button.

At a high level, here are the steps we’ll be following:

• Generate a Twilio Video token for a VOYCE interpreter
• Set up a basic front end user interface for the VOYCE service
• Build an integration with the VOYCE service related core APIs

If you’d like to skip straight to the …

If the news and current statistics about remote work are any indicator of the future, it’s obvious that working from home is gradually becoming the new normal for employees all over the world, including numerous tech companies. While effective communication may be defined differently for various companies, one of the most promising ways to improve productivity and keep your team together involves using video conferencing or chat.

This tutorial will guide you on how to create a video conferencing chat application using Symfony, React.js, and Twilio Programmable Video. The video chat application will allow users to connect and participate in a predefined chat room.

Prerequisites

To participate in this tutorial, you will need the following:

• A Twilio Account
• Composer globally installed on your computer to manage dependencies
• Preferred basic knowledge of building applications with React and Symfony
• Node.js and Yarn package manager installed on your computer
• Symfony …

In March, Twilio released quick deploy video apps for three different platforms - React.js, iOS, and Android. These apps are fully functioning video collaboration apps that can be deployed to the cloud in minutes. They serve as a canonical reference for developers building out their communication solutions by showcasing the features and capabilities of Programmable Video.

When you build a video app, you can get pretty far with just audio and video. But what if you want to go above and beyond audio and video to build more engaging video experiences by adding hand-raising, annotations, whiteboarding, and more?

The answer is DataTracks. With Twilio Video, you can use DataTracks to send real-time ephemeral data such as text, JSON, or binary data to other participants in a video call. We say the data is ‘ephemeral’ because it isn’t persisted anywhere. If you aren’t in a room when …

As we’ve all personally experienced, many face-to-face interactions have been replaced with virtual ones, over video. There are new use cases popping up every day from virtual court, to remote clienteling, to house viewings. That’s because more and more developers are looking to build video apps.

Customers such as MDLive are building telehealth applications, making healthcare more accessible. In the education space, Air Tutors is making tutoring more engaging with virtual whiteboards, annotations, and animation to bring subjects such as math to life.

At SIGNAL, we are announcing that Twilio Video WebRTC Go will be generally available. This is a 1:1 experience that developers configure and use with our Video JS, Android, and iOS SDKs. It’s a developer toolkit that removes the complexity of building directly on top of WebRTC. Not only is it generally available, it's also free. This is not just a free trial. Twilio Video WebRTC Go …

Humans are inherently social beings and communication is at the core of these connections.  Twilio provides developers with a wide array of channels, from voice, to messaging, email, to SMS, and of course, video.

While consumers have been gravitating towards video in social media for quite some time, organizations are now adopting video at a much higher velocity. A study by Twilio showed that the pandemic accelerated digital transformation at companies by 6 years. That same pattern is playing out with Twilio Video. While not a material portion of Twilio's business, Twilio Video has experienced a 540% year-over-year increase in weekly minutes compared to this time last year.

This year, Twilio invested in new Video features and we’ve seen adoption by a range of customers including Telehealth, Education, and Virtual Visits. What has made our customers successful is that they’ve created customized video applications centered around user experience. …

Providing users with the ability to switch between the speakerphone, earpiece, or headset to handle audio input and output selection is a required feature for any real-time communication app. To implement audio device selection using the Android framework requires hundreds of lines of complex code. AudioSwitch was written to encapsulate the complexity of this feature and solves the following challenges:

• Manage audio device selection
• Detect changes in audio device availability
• Handle audio device selection errors and timeouts
• Provide a reliable Bluetooth selection service

Today, we are proud to announce the General Availability of AudioSwitch!

AudioSwitch enables developers to easily integrate audio device management into an Android application with the following capabilities:

• Manage audio focus for VoIP and Video conferencing use cases
• Manage audio input and output device selection
  • Detect changes in available audio devices
  • Enumerate audio devices
  • Select an audio device
• Support for the following audio devices:
  • Bluetooth Headset …

Ahoy!

What an incredible journey it’s been since we released our Video collaboration apps earlier this year. To date, we have observed thousands of deployments, collaborated on hundreds of Github issues, and helped many developers accelerate their Programmable Video solutions to market.

Today we are excited to announce an important update to the collaboration apps and the Twilio CLI RTC plugin intended to help developers deploy more Video!

Passcode Update

Deploying a Video app with version 0.1.x of the RTC plugin results in a 10 digit passcode being generated. Reference the following example output.

Starting with 0.2.0, the RTC plugin increased the length of the passcode from 10 digits to 14. Reference the following updated output.

WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) empowers developers to build powerful voice and video communication solutions on web pages that work across browsers and devices. No plugins necessary. Whether you're building peer-to-peer video, content sharing, messaging, or chat tools, WebRTC makes coding easy and the end experience user-friendly.

Best of all, WebRTC is completely free. This open-source project provides the simple APIs needed to get audio and video communications working seamlessly on your web pages. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, and Opera all support WebRTC's standardization across devices and browsers, so expect this new standard to stick around for the long haul.

If you're looking to use WebRTC APIs for your on-page communication solutions, we'll walk you through everything you need to know. First, we'll start with common use cases and benefits, and then we'll move on to how you can get started with WebRTC in little-to-no time.

What Is WebRTC used for? …

Telemedicine is rapidly changing the healthcare industry. COVID-19 concerns aside, being able to see a doctor’s face without having to commute is a game changer.

Twilio Video allows developers to craft HIPAA-compliant telemedicine solutions that are fully under your control and tailored to your patients’ needs. Today I’ll show you how to make a telemedicine app using Twilio Video that lets you show a “virtual waiting room” where the patient can hang out until their doctor arrives. For the sake of simplicity, let’s build the front end in vanilla JS without a framework.

At a high level, here’s the steps we’ll be following:

• Set up a back end to control access to the application
• Set up basic front end scaffolding
• Build the provider experience
• Build the patient experience

For impatient types who want to skip straight to the code, the whole project is on GitHub.

Prerequisites

• A developer environment …