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.

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 …

The Twilio Programmable Video API allows you to build customized video chat applications on top of the WebRTC standard. In this article, I’m going to show you how to add a screen sharing option to a browser-based Programmable Video application built in JavaScript.

Tutorial requirements

In this tutorial we are going to add a screen sharing feature to the video chat application built with JavaScript and Python on a previous introductory tutorial. 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 interpreter, you can go to python.org to download an installer.
• A free or paid Twilio account. If you are new to Twilio get your free account now! This link will give you $10 when you upgrade.
• A web browser that is compatible with the Twilio Programmable Video JavaScript library (see below …

Over the last few months, we have seen a surge in interest from developers building video communication web apps for mobile devices. We have worked closely with customers to overcome obstacles inherent in using video in the browser on a mobile device. Based on these experiences, we've compiled a list of best practices so you can avoid the pitfalls and deliver great video experiences in mobile browsers.

Mobile Browser Challenges

A  web app running in a mobile phone web browser is the quickest and easiest way to get into a video call. Just click on the web link from a text message or email and you can be in a video call on your phone in seconds - no app install required.

However, there are some challenges unique to mobile browsers that do not exist with their desktop counterparts. The top gotchas that often catch developers out are:

• Another tab …

Pose detection is one fun and interesting task in computer vision and machine learning. In a video chat, it could be used to detect if someone is touching their face, falling asleep, performing a yoga pose correctly, and so much more! 

Read on to learn how to perform pose detection in the browser of a Twilio Video chat application using TensorFlow.js and the PoseNet model.

Setup

To build a Twilio Programmable Video application, we will need:

• A Twilio account - sign up for a free one here and receive an extra $10 if you upgrade through this link
• Account SID: find it in your account console here
• API Key SID and API Key Secret: generate them here
• The Twilio CLI

Follow this post to get setup with a starter Twilio Video app and to understand Twilio Video for JavaScript a bit more, or download this repo and follow the …

With many of us now working remote, video chats are so in right now. Here’s how to get up-and-running with a video chat room in nine minutes using Twilio Programmable Video and the Twilio Serverless Toolkit in JavaScript.

Setup

To build a Twilio Programmable Video application, we will need:

• A Twilio account - sign up for a free one here and receive an extra $10 if you upgrade through this link
• Account SID: find it in your account console here
• API Key SID and API Key Secret: generate them here
• The Twilio CLI

Save your API Keys somewhere to use them soon and then install the Twilio Serverless Toolkit via the Twilio CLI if you haven't already by running

As we dutifully practice social distancing, live video conferencing is increasingly popular. From company meetings to yoga classes and magic shows, traditional in person events are going virtual. But while technology connects us, it also comes with privacy and security risks.

This post will show you how to add one-time passcode authentication on top of your Twilio Video application to ensure that only registered users are able to access the conference.

While passwords may help protect against war dialing, they don't guarantee that the people joining the video conference should be allowed to participate. A lot of people are still widely sharing Zoom meeting IDs and passwords.

One-time passcode authentication is useful for gating:

• Paid content like workout classes, political fundraisers, or live dating shows.
• Sensitive content with an access control list (ACL)

This tutorial will walk you through adding Twilio Verify SMS verification to …