January 2023 Summaries

Conversational AI has made significant advancements in recent years, enabling it to simulate human-like conversation and understand context. The technology is becoming increasingly sophisticated, allowing chatbots to provide more tailored and relevant answers to users' questions. However, the current training method of relying on vast numbers of documents downloaded from the web may not lead to natural conversations. To overcome this challenge, conversational AI needs to be trained on actual conversations, such as video calls, which contain valuable information including audio and visual cues that can provide input for training AI systems. Training on video calls could improve the ability of chatbots to understand nuances of human speech and recognize emotional states, leading to more effective communication in natural two-way conversations. A corpus of video calls can be used to train large language models and address the lack of training data identified as a challenge with current state of AI, enabling companies to create artificial intelligence agents for specific use cases such as customer service or telehealth.

Switching to a new real-time video API can be daunting for developers who already have an established user base and cannot afford downtime. Many are wary of the effort involved in migrating from existing providers like Vonage OpenTok, which may not offer features such as Daily's Global Mesh Network, automatic switching between peer-to-peer and server-routed video calls, or low-level control over encoding and networking parameters. However, Daily provides guides, demos, and videos to help developers transition smoothly, including two video walkthroughs on transitioning from OpenTok to Daily, a guide on using shim libraries as drop-in replacements for OpenTok, and an in-depth technical guide covering step-by-step code migration, real-life examples of changes made during migrations, and lessons learned.

This migration took one person about seven days using Daily's reference docs. By following the new transition guide, the implementation time could be reduced to as little as four days. SimplyDoc is a starter kit that can be used as a quick start to building a custom telehealth application. The migration process involved changing the backend and frontend components of the application from OpenTok to Daily. The key steps included identifying creation of OpenTok sessions and tokens, replacing OpenTok session connection logic with Daily room join logic, removing OpenTok-specific code for handling participant state, developing UI component(s) to manage video and audio tracks for call participants, and finally replacing OpenTok events with Daily events. The migration was made possible by using Daily's reference docs and demos, as well as the OpenTok transition guide provided by Daily.