September 2019 Summaries

You can use your API key from Daily.co together with Zapier to get notified when someone joins one of your rooms, which is helpful in scenarios like private or team-only rooms, reminders, or locking specific rooms. To create this notification, you'll need a Daily.co account and a Zapier account, and follow these steps: first, sign in to Zapier, then choose the "Catch Hook" trigger event, set up your webhook URL with your Daily.co API key and room link, open your meeting link, test and continue, add an optional filter for notifications from other users, add an action step like sending a direct message to Slack, and finally save your Zap.

Active Speaker` is a feature that highlights the person currently talking in video calls, improving conversation flow and preserving bandwidth for better quality. The two components of this feature are `Indicator UI` and `Active Speaker Layout`, with the latter displaying the speaker's video feed prominently in the center of the screen while minimizing other participants' feeds to the lower right corner. This layout helps save data and improve call quality, but its setting is not remembered when the call ends. The feature was initially automatically triggered by poor connections but was changed based on user feedback, who found it distracting during team calls.

Our Daily.co video calls now work seamlessly across multiple browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, thanks to the expansion of our support for non-Chrome browsers over the past year. This improvement allows users to join group calls with up to 50 people in these browsers and API calls can support even larger groups, while also removing the "beta" flag previously seen by Safari and Firefox users. The new features enhance user experience and make video calls easy and seamless across various devices and platforms.

You can easily add video calls to your website using Daily.co's API, starting with their free plan. To embed a call, you'll need to paste specific code onto your site and replace the link with one created in your dashboard or programmatically. The call will be embedded on your site, allowing for customization of layout and design through CSS Grid, and can also be controlled programmatically using the REST API. With this integration, you can provide a seamless video calling experience to meeting guests directly from your website.