Introducing Conference Events

Today, we are announcing Public Beta for Conference Events. You will be able to subscribe to changes in participant and conference states and be notified accordingly. You will not have to poll the API’s anymore to maintain the state of each participants. This drastically reduces the complexity of your application. Conference Events will be available for free. We’ve also made Call Progress Events available for free to bolster this capability.

Webhooks for Key Events

You can enable Call Progress Events by using the new

StatusCallbackEvent

TwiML parameter, now available for the

Conference

; noun within the

Dial

verb. This complements the

StatusCallbackEvents

already available on

Number

,

Client

, and

SIP

. The

StatusCallbackEvent

parameter will trigger a webhook on specific state changes of the conference or participants resources.
So far, you could only receive an event when a conference ended, if you had specified that the conferences was to be recorded. Now you can subscribe to all the following events.

• conference-start

  The conference has started and audio is being mixed between all participants. This occurs when there is at least one participant in the conference and a particpant with

  startConferenceOnEnter="true"

  joins.

 

• conference-end

  The last participant has left the conference or a particpant with

  endConferenceOnExit="true"

  leaves the conference.

 

• participant-join

  Notifies when a participant joins.

 

• participant-leave

  Notifies when a participant leaves.

 

• participant-mute

  Notifies when a participant have been muted. This can be done through an API call to the participant resource.

 

• participant-unmute

  Notifies when a participant have been un-muted. This can be done through an API call to the participant resource.

 
 
For example, if you want to request a webhook on all the possible conference state changes, you can do so with TwiML.

TeamMeeting

In this case

StartConferenceOnEnter

was set to the default value of true so the conference starts whenever the second participant joins.

 

Modify the status of a participant

In addition to eliminating the need to poll resources to check status change, you will no longer need to discover and maintain Conference and Calls SIDs. They will be returned back in the same webhook, so you can use that info to modify the participant resource.

Expanding our example diagramed above, you can mute all the participants except the presenter, Mary, whenever everybody have joined and the Team Meeting is ready to start. As some participants might never join, you can avoid keeping the others waiting too long by setting a timer after the conference starts.

This is an example of webhook you would get when the participant Alice joins the call.

AccountSid    AC25e16e9a716a4a1786a7c83f58e30482
CallSid    CA8a0727575027a5c4d9614e633c929546
ConferenceSid    CF47001dbd9067b3007c1fcd05f43183f8
EndConferenceOnExit    false
FriendlyName    TeamMeeting
Muted    false
StartConferenceOnEnter    true
StatusCallbackEvent    participant-join

 
You can store Alice’s call SID and update any associated UIs.

 
Let’s say we got a call SID for participants Alice (xxx), Bob (yyy) and Charles (zzz) before the timer expired. You can now POST your API request to mute them and start Mary’s presentation.
 

 

$ curl -XPOST https://api.twilio.com/2010-04-01/Accounts/AC5ef8732a3c49700934481addd5ce1659/Conferences/CFbbe4632a3c49700934481addd5ce1659/Participants/CA386025c9bf5d6052a1d1ea42b4d16662.json \
    -d "Muted=True" \
    -u 'AC5ef8732a3c49700934481addd5ce1659:{AuthToken}'

 
This is just a simple use case but the possibilities are endless. You can control any call leg and take actions in response to a given change in participant status.
We think Conference Events will help you build Collaboration and Call Center application faster and more efficiently. Learn more about Call Progress Events in our TwiML docs for . We can’t wait to see what you build.

Introducing Conference Events