Managing your active telephony calls with Call Control APIs
Controlling a voice call with APIs is like possessing the magical power of wizard of Oz at the tip of your fingers. You can do whatever you want and it makes you empowered to use telephony in innovative ways that were never possible earlier. At RingCentral, our customers wanted these magical powers to be more productive and efficient in their day to day job. This is the reason we are excited to introduce active call control APIs as a part of RingCentral platform offering. In this article, I will discuss all the active call control features we are introducing as a part of the 10.2 release. Currently, these active call control APIs are in a beta version and we are seeking to get more feedback from you.
What is a Call Control API?
In traditional telephony terms, an active call is a connection or active session between the calling and the called party, in case of a conference, there will be multiple parties involved. Call Control APIs are interfaces or adaptors to an active call which allows you to control different aspects of that call. Examples could be you want to mute a party, you want to hold and unhold a call, start recording an active call, stop recording and many other features including hanging up an call. In a traditional telephony handset, you have to remember special buttons or numbers like *80 etc to perform these functions and also need to be physically present near your phone to be able to control the call. Call control apis provides you the freedom from all of that, with these apis you can now build customized applications that empowers you to manage all these functionalities from your very own app.
Before we start with the call control API details, lets go over couple of use cases where some of our customers would be using call control apis.
Use Cases
a. In a contact center scenario where each agent has a dedicated desk phone and a headset, during an active customer call, the agent is fully engaged in speaking with the customer and working at her desktop either screen sharing or actively working and looking at her computer screen. A custom app with call control api, will enable them to control aspects of the call like recording the call, muting the call, unmuting the call, transferring another incoming and many other functions without leaving her desktop screen. Everything can be incorporated right within a desktop or web app. It also provides the agent freedom from remembering the hotkeys for each action.
b. Smart control of incoming calls based on your business logic. Based on your requirements you want to record some calls coming from certain customers. Using a combination of active calls and call control APIs, you can detect who is calling and record or not record the call accordingly.
There can be numerous other use cases that can be implemented using the active call control APIs.
Demo App
We also have a demo app built by one of our engineers. This shows various features of the Call Control APIs.
Link: https://github.com/vyshakhbabji/ringcentral-webphone-callcontrol
Release 10.2 Call Control API Features
The various aspects of the Call Control feature we are introducing are
- Forward
- Reject
- Mute
- Unmute
- Hold
- Unhold
- Transfer (Blind)
- Park
- Recording Start/Stop
- Flip
- EndCall
In order to share all of the details of our Call Control APIs and how to use them would make this blog too long, so be sure to checkout our Developer Guide and API Documentation:
Call Control Developer Guide: https://ringcentral-api-docs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/active_call_control_quick_start/
Call Control API Documentation: https://developers.ringcentral.com/api-reference/Call-Control/
Please feel free to leave your questions comments.
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