September 2021 Summaries

Coding Rooms is an online platform for teaching programming that provides teachers with a dashboard view of students' work, allowing them to access students' code in real-time. The platform enables remote classes and video chats between teachers and students. To ensure reliable video quality, Coding Rooms integrated the Daily video call platform, which has greatly improved their support tickets and customer retention rates. The switch to Daily has also given the team new peace of mind and freed up time and resources to grow their business. With Daily's dashboard reporting and data visualizations, Coding Rooms can quickly respond to remaining customer support queries, making it easier for them to optimize end-user performance on students' devices.

At Daily, they provide multiple ways to use their video and audio APIs to accommodate various use cases. They aim to balance implementations that do most of the work for customers with options that let customers customize their apps as much as possible. This is demonstrated by integrating a text chat feature into a video call, allowing users to choose from prebuilt chat widgets or build their own using TalkJS. The integration involves setting up a Daily account and a TalkJS account, creating roles in the TalkJS dashboard, and using React to create the demo application. The demo showcases how to join a Daily call, use the TalkJS chat widget, and leave the call, highlighting the flexibility of integrating these two services.

Daily aims to build video and audio APIs that work for everyone, focusing on accessibility features such as making UIs keyboard-accessible, adding skip links in navigation bars, special treatment of "hidden" elements, using semantic HTML, removing focus traps, avoiding keyboard traps, and optimizing site performance. The company uses web accessibility guidelines from the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) to ensure its products meet the goals set out by web accessibility standards. By implementing these features, Daily aims to make its UIs accessible to everyone, regardless of barriers such as disability, geography, language, device restrictions, and more.

This demo app uses manifest v2, which is being deprecated by Chrome in 2022 and will no longer be accepted into the Chrome store. The app, called Daily Collab, is a Chrome extension that lets users embed and transcribe Daily video calls in any Notion page. It includes a prejoin UI feature that allows participants to preview their video before joining a call, select their preferred devices (camera and microphone), and set their username. The prejoin UI is built using custom video APIs and can be customized further. To use the app, users need to clone it locally, install dependencies, and run `npm start`. The app determines its main content based on the value of `callState`, which can be in one of five states: idle, setup, haircheck, joined, or error. When a participant joins a call, they are taken to the prejoin UI, where they can set their username and select devices. Once they have completed these settings, they can click the "Join call" button to join the call. The app uses Daily's methods `preAuth`, `startCamera`, and `join` to manage the call state and device access.

This tutorial showcases how to easily integrate video calls into a Bubble app using the Daily plugin for Bubble. The process involves setting up a new Bubble app, installing the Daily plugin, and configuring it to create a room in Daily with a unique ID that can be accessed by users through a custom link. The tutorial also covers displaying the correct link on the index page, hiding empty links, and setting up a join room workflow to automatically open the video call when the page loads.

This demo app uses manifest v2, which is being deprecated by Chrome in 2022. The tutorial focuses on integrating the Notion API to embed a custom video chat experience in Notion and transcribe calls into Notion documents. The Daily Collab Chrome extension uses Deepgram for transcription text generation and sends it to the client via an app-message event listener. The background script then passes the transcription text to the Daily Collab custom API, which makes a PATCH request to update the Notion document with the new block child containing the transcription text. If the request is successful, the text will be added to the screen in the Notion document; otherwise, an error message will be displayed. The structure of the code keeps all API requests related to Daily Collab in one place and isolates application secrets, making it a secure and organized way to interact with the Notion API.