This week at Daily we're highlighting a couple of the different ways developers can build video experiences on our platform. Earlier this week we discussed our React Component Library.
Today we’re sharing a beta release that extends Daily Prebuilt, our hosted call component offering. The Prebuilt Integrations API allows developers to easily add third-party applications or custom code into the UI of Daily Prebuilt.
Daily Prebuilt is a fully-working video call you can embed in your app, in minutes. It already includes one of the most powerful feature sets out-of-the-box, extensive customization options, and full access to our fully-featured JavaScript API. Now with just a few additional lines of code, developers can add third-party apps that feel native to the call experience.
With this beta release, you have complete flexibility in features available to your users. Developers can easily integrate users' favorite apps, and those key to your use case, such as:
- Whiteboard together, via Miro
- Collaborate on documents, via apps like Google Docs or Notion
- Watch a video on YouTube
- Communicate in long-form chat, via CometChat
- Add any hosted application you've built yourself
- Or let your users do all these things at once!
Read on for more about use cases and the UI display. If you're ready to start building, head on over to our reference docs or our technical tutorial.
Further enabling a variety of use cases
Daily Prebuilt customers often start with a tool like Zoom in their product experience, and want a developer-focused alternative. For these teams, Daily Prebuilt is a polished video call UI that has all the features users expect in a video calling tool. (Its built-in features include 100,000 real-time participant support, mobile, localization, dual screen sharing, recording, host and moderator controls, breakout rooms, HIPAA compliance enablement, and more.)
Our customers also have use case needs, requiring specific functionality, and the industries they serve often have preferred third-party apps. The Prebuilt Integrations API makes solving this straightforward; for example:
- A professional learning platform helps enterprise customers provide executive coaching to their global workforce. Whiteboarding is a key part of the UX, encouraging brainstorming and learning between coach and employee. Through the Prebuilt Integrations API, with fewer than 15 lines of code, a developer can add Miro whiteboarding as an option in the UI.
- An edtech company works with a school system that uses G-Suite as their designated vendor. A developer easily can add Google Docs to the Daily Prebuilt call frame. In this way, their customers can collaborate in real-time, whether for parent-teacher meetings, educator and administrator virtual workshops, or virtual tutoring and enrichment for students.
- A healthcare product team can create a seamless digital experience from pre- to post-visit with secure HIPAA-compliant messaging from a third-party app like CometChat. Daily Prebuilt was the first video call embed to offer HIPAA compliance enablement. While basic text chat is a feature that comes included with Daily Prebuilt, this is an example of how third-party apps can add deep functionality. CometChat offers features like long-lived chats, file sharing, and more. A developer can add a CometChat integration in the sidebar element (more below). Learn more about our partner CometChat's messaging and text chat offerings.
How it works: API design and UI display
Daily has designed this API to make adding new apps straightforward, while still giving you the flexibility to customize integrations to behave as you want. You can specify which participants are able to interact with the app, whether its state is shared or private, and use Daily’s call frame events to update integrations during the call.
These third-party apps are displayed as native elements within the UI, in two locations:
- In the main video area, as a content embed (similar to a screen share)
- In the sidebar on the right-hand side of the video call, as a sidebar embed
How to start: pricing, docs, and developer tutorial
To learn more about this beta release, refer to our reference docs. Our engineer teammate Liza also has written a technical tutorial on how to add Miro and CometChat with the Prebuilt Integrations API.
You can start building with 10,000 free monthly minutes. There is no additional cost to build with Daily Prebuilt or the Prebuilt Integrations API. Visit our pricing page to learn about our usage-based pricing, enterprise SLAs, HIPAA compliance support, and more.
Conclusion
The Prebuilt Integrations API adds a new, additional set of customization possibilities to Daily Prebuilt. Prebuilt already offers a rich standard feature set and a wide range of options for theming the user interface. But more customization and extensibility further expands what developers can create with Daily Prebuilt. And, of course, you can also use our Client SDKs to build your own video and audio applications from lower-level building blocks.
We're excited to get customer feedback during beta! We'd love to hear how you use integrations, and the functionality our Daily Prebuilt developers come up with. If you have ideas to discuss or want to learn more about what this release makes possible, please head over to our Discord community and share them with us and fellow developers! We're here to help.
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