David Alfaro presents an innovative Multichannel Chatbot and WebRTC app at TADSummit
Is your chatbot designed to be transactional or conversational? Multichannel or single channel? Social or functional? These are important questions to answer as you consider any sort of customer contact strategy involving text or video chat. Last week, my business partner David Alfaro attended the TADSummit in Lisbon, Portugal, and presented the multichannel chatbot that a few members of our team built for the Global TADHack in October. As previously blogged about, our team won
WebRTC ventures team wins TADHack prize for Bot
As part of the 2016 TADHack Global, a few members of the WebRTC ventures team submitted a hack from New York City - and we're pleased to say they won a prize! David Alfaro, Néstor Bermúdez, and Germán Goldenstein from our team built a multichannel bot to demonstrate the possibilities of virtual medical assistants. Also joining the team to help on the front end work was Juan Ignacio Serra, a New York based designer and
WebRTC ventures announces Maynor Taisigüe as Information Security Officer
Information Security is an increasingly important topic and one that is too often overlooked. This is true in all web development, but as WebRTC video technology continues to mature and become a more critical part of internet communications, it’s also true for WebRTC development. As our team has grown at WebRTC ventures, and as we serve more and more clients in all industry verticals, security has become more and more important. That’s why I’m pleased
Connecting Twilio Video with a Bot
I've written recently about the potential of combining WebRTC and bots together into one application. In June, David Alfaro and I made a presentation at WebRTC Argentina which showed some simple examples of how you might combine a bot and live human support for telemedicine applications. You can see the video of that presentation below, or read the transcript and see the slides on RealTimeWeekly. In this post however, I want to talk a little
Bots vs WebRTC: Who will win?
Bots, Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and Artificial Intelligence are all the rage right now. As one speaker at Twilio’s Signal conference sarcastically said this week, “it seems like every startup in San Francisco has to have a f’in bot strategy now!” WebRTC is all about connecting real humans though, peer to peer, in a video chat directly in the browser. One popular use case is live support tools, as another channel for customer service or
5 uses of the WebRTC Data Channel
The DataChannel is often a second-class citizen of the WebRTC eco-system. WebRTC is increasingly well known because of the ability to easily get access to the camera and microphone from a user's laptop, using only javascript. This video and audio combination, combined with the Peer to Peer (P2P) architecture of WebRTC, has opened up many applications involving secure video chat. Telehealth apps, video conferencing in the browser, collaboration tools, telepresence solutions, and more ... all
Announcing WebRTC Argentina!
We are proud to announce the WebRTC Argentina mini-conference to be held in Buenos Aires, Argentina on June 15th 2016. It is the first WebRTC conference of it's kind in Argentina, and our team at WebRTC.ventures is a sponsor and organizer of the event. You can learn more and register for this free event at: http://realtimeweekly.co/webrtc-argentina-2016/ The 3 hour mini-conference will be a series of short talks covering the basics of WebRTC as well as use
Scaling your WebRTC application
Given our experience with WebRTC applications, we’re asked sometimes to provide some guidance or advice to other teams implementing a real time communications app. We’re often too busy with our clients to provide detailed technical support or troubleshooting, but there is general advice we can often share. In one of those recent calls I was asked “How do I scale my WebRTC application?” This particular person is building a telehealth solution for a large emerging
Viewpoint on WebRTC for mHealth
Is WebRTC the best way to deliver telehealth consultations? What are the pros and cons? I tried to address those questions to mobile health professionals in a recent edition of the mHealth Journal. In my viewpoint column entitled "WebRTC: delivering telehealth in the browser", I give an overview of WebRTC, and the unique challenges and benefits it offers for telemedicine applications. I have included a summary of the key points below, and you can also
WebRTC and IoT – Arin Sime on Dialogic Podcast
Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking with Alan Percy from Dialogic on his Developer Comms Podcast. We talked about WebRTC and the Internet of Things (IoT), building on a presentation that I gave earlier this month at WebRTC Boston. In the talk, we discussed an example of how WebRTC and IoT intersect for Telehealth applications, emergency services, and hacking around these topics. We also talked about how there is a lot of potential in
WebRTCventures Sponsoring WebRTC Standards webinars
This Wednesday March 30th will be the 3rd edition of the WebRTC Standards Live Session, and our team at WebRTC ventures is proud to be their first corporate sponsor! The main topic will be around screensharing, but these sessions are focused on viewers' Q&A so you can ask them any question about WebRTC that you like. From an email announcing the event: This time we’ll be talking about screen sharing in WebRTC and screen capture.
3 Things WebRTC Cannot Do
Our team is always receiving interesting calls from customers and potential customers, who want to know if their web or mobile communications or collaboration application can be implemented using WebRTC technologies. Sometimes those calls lead to some insights in industry trends (which I've documented previously here), and other times they highlight misunderstandings about what capabilities WebRTC gives us. The following 3 misconceptions have come up in several recent conversations I've had. The fact that these
Arin Sime featured in “WebRTC Topic of the Month”
There are a number of great WebRTC blogs out there, including "The New Dialtone" by Amir Zmora. One of the regular features Amir writes is the WebRTC "Topic of the Month", where he poses a question to WebRTC activists and thought leaders. I'm proud to have been included in the most recent edition, where Amir asked us the following question: Is there anything significant in the RingCentral WebRTC API announcement and what does it mean
WebRTC Boston Recap
I originally posted this article on RealTimeWeekly.co - sign up for free weekly news on the latest real time technologies and events, including WebRTC! What's the latest news with WebRTC? At WebRTC Boston, we heard about the latest on WebRTC adoption, IoT and WebRTC, codecs, WebRTC broadcasting, and if WebRTC has been a failure or a success. On March 1st, I traveled to Cambridge, Massachusetts for the WebRTC Boston meetup. Chad Hart of WebRTC Hacks
IoT and WebRTC – presentation at WebRTC Boston
Does WebRTC have a place in the Internet of Things? This is a question I've often wondered and an area I'm expecting to see a lot of growth in WebRTC development. At WebRTC Boston today, I had a chance to explore this question in a session on "Putting WebRTC into Things." In this talk, I gave an overview of how people are experimenting with WebRTC and the IoT. In this presentation, which I've summarized below,
Live Streaming the Snowpocalypse with WebRTC
Last week we had a major snowstorm on the East Coast of the United States, where I live. Over 60 centimeters of snow fell and life ground to a frozen halt. The kids were all home from school, but I still needed to work and fortunately the storm never took out power or internet where I live. The front steps to my house after Snowpocalypse hits Virginia. But it probably wasn’t
Video Chat and WebRTC Takes Online Education and Tutoring to a New Level
The world of online education and tutoring has been remarkably enhanced and changed in a number of ways by video chat and WebRTC capabilities. The addition of these capabilities has brought a positive level of interaction and engagement that was missing from online education and tutoring, as well as an increase in academic success of students now participating in these web-based learning environments. Before video chat and WebRTC, online education was limited to text-based messages
7 things to expect in WebRTC development in 2016
I became interested in WebRTC a few years ago, and immediately saw the disruptive nature of WebRTC in the browser. Peer to peer, encrypted communications in the browser has so many applications. At the time, most of the demo applications were "skype killers" - video conferencing tools that aspired to take out the dominance of Skype or more expensive Unified Communications tools. Since 2014, my development company AgilityFeat (now also operating as WebRTC.ventures) began to
WebRTC and IoT Sensors
WebRTC is not just video - it's Data too! WebRTC is not just about video chat, although that is almost always part of it. WebRTC allows for Peer to Peer video chat, audio chat, or data exchange between two web browser clients. With a little extra work, mobile apps can get in on the fun too. This opens up some interesting possibilities in the coming wave of "things" on the internet. There are two general
The worst part of building WebRTC mobile apps
Software development is hard, especially when you are working with a cutting edge technology like WebRTC. Of course, that's what makes it exciting too! WebRTC enables video chat in browsers and mobile devices As you may already know, WebRTC is an HTML5 standard for building peer-to-peer video chat applications in the browser. The key phrase to notice in this case is HTML5. HTML5 is the latest generation of markup language for browsers, but not all
