Product changelog and announcements

We are excited to announce AI-Based Noise Cancellation in Twilio Video to help developers remove unwanted sounds and build high quality meeting experiences. Built in partnership with leading noise suppression vendor Krisp.ai, the Krisp Audio Plugin for Twilio Video can be added to your browser application in a few lines of code.

This feature is available for Group Rooms in the JavaScript SDK. Please read our documentation to learn how to use noise cancellation in your video application. You can also watch a demo of this feature and learn more about the value of noise cancellation in our blog.

We are excited to release two new features to help you improve the resiliency of your Twilio Video workflows.

First, we have updated the congestion control used to measure available bandwidth for publisher and subscriber clients. The new congestion control will provide higher available bandwidth in extremely low bandwidth scenarios as well as faster bitrate recovery times in oscillating network conditions. This feature has been rolled out across all Twilio Video workflows and is automatically enabled on your Rooms.

Second, we released a new Media Warnings API. This API, which is only available for Javascript SDK users, will trigger a warning if you are recording a Participant but no media is being received by the media server. This alert enables you to know in advance if a recording track is going to be incomplete and empowers you to improve the situation by, for example, reconnecting the Participant. You can read more about the alert in our SDK changelog documentation.

The Video Diagnostics App tests an end user’s ability to have a quality video call with Twilio Programmable Video. It runs through a series of tests to identify issues related to device and software setup, connectivity to the Twilio cloud, and network performance. Upon failed tests, it provides recommendations to help your users help themselves.

With this release, the Video Diagnostics app is now available for your use as
a Twilio-hosted web app. It can be used as part of your onboarding or support processes to assist in diagnosing end-user issues. This hosted version of the Video Diagnostics app supersedes the legacy network test tool (https://networktest.twilio.com/).

If you would rather customize the app and embed it into your application, the code is freely available as an open source ReactJS app and provides a reference for how to utilize Twilio’s RTC Diagnostics SDK and the Javascript Preflight API.

For more information on the Video Diagnostics application, check it out live by visiting https://video-diagnostics.twilio.com or learn more in the README.

Video Insights brings self-service tooling to the Twilio Console to help you observe application usage and quality, discover trends across all your rooms and participants, and troubleshoot end-user issues. You can use Video Insights to build higher-quality video experiences for your customers, reduce churn, and scale confidently.

As part of the general availability launch, you will now have a revamped experience to filter and explore your rooms, dropdowns for segmenting your participants by signaling_region and end_reason via the Insights Dashboard, and much more.

Get started now by visiting Video Insights in the Twilio Console or refer to our blog post to learn more.

The Preflight API (runPreflight) provides JavaScript developers a way to test end-user connectivity with Twilio’s servers. It can be used as part of a waiting room, to detect issues prior to an end-user joining a Twilio Video Room, or as part of a troubleshooting page. For more information, check out the documentation.

We are excited to announce the JavaScript SDK release of Adaptive Simulcast, a new feature that improves client performance by dynamically switching off unused simulcast spatial layers.

When using adaptive simulcast, a publisher will only encode video layers up to the highest spatial layer being used by subscribers.

For example, a common presentation layout in video chat will have the active speaker’s video in a large format and the remaining participants as thumbnails. In this situation, adaptive simulcast will encode all spatial layers for the active speaker and only the smallest spatial layer for the thumbnail participants. As speakers change, the respective publishing participants will automatically have their spatial layers turned on / off based on what is being used by subscribers in the room.

Compared to standard simulcast, adaptive simulcast will provide significant CPU and bandwidth improvements for your publishing clients, and we recommend all users switch from standard simulcast to adaptive simulcast.

This feature is currently only available in the JavaScript SDK. Please read our simulcast documentation to learn how to use this new feature.

The feature External Storage for Video Recordings is now available for all video customers. Customers can configure the Video Recordings service to push Recordings or Compositions directly to their AWS S3 Bucket without additional charges.

This Video Recordings feature allows builders to create a recording workflow that matches their specific use case and regulatory needs. For example, a customer in the Education space may decide to store the composed recordings of a virtual classroom into a custom S3 for data sovereignty preferences.

This feature was previously a part of Twilio Editions.

To learn more check out the blog post or visit the documentation on Storing Recordings or Compositions to AWS S3.

The Twilio Video Room Monitor is now generally available.

The Video Room Monitor is a browser-based tool that provides JavaScript developers visibility into the inner workings of their Twilio Video application. It displays real-time information and metrics from the Room object and can be added to any Twilio Video JavaScript application with just a few lines of code.

The Video Room Monitor can be used as a tool during all phases of development or can be forked, customized, and provided to end-users as an in-call troubleshooting view.

For more information on the Video Room Monitor, see the documentation or visit the README.

Two new video room timeout parameters, empty_room_timeout and unused_room_timeout, have been added to the video rooms REST API to allow you to better manage the lifecycle of a video room.

The empty room timeout specifies how long a room will remain active after the last participant leaves, while the unused room timeout specifies how long a room will remain active if no one joins. Both values are set upon room creation and operate independently. The new maximum value for both parameters is 60 minutes and the default value remains five minutes.

These values are only configurable for rooms created with the REST API and can be applied to WebRTC Go, Peer-to-Peer, and Group Rooms. For rooms created via the Ad-hoc method, these values are zero by default and cannot be changed.

For more information on configuring room timeouts, view the Video Rooms REST API documentation.

We are excited to announce the availability of 24 hour participant durations for video rooms.

You can now configure the Maximum Participant Duration for any Twilio Video room type. This value is set at the time of room creation, and upon reaching the limit, a participant will be disconnected from the room.

The default value for maximum participant duration is 4 hours. You can change this value either through the Console under Rooms Settings to make it the default for Ad-hoc rooms or as a configurable parameter via the REST API upon room creation.

For more information on configuring the maximum participant duration, view the participant duration documentation. If you are composing room recordings of participants with long durations, you may want to review the composition size limitations.