Introduction to Azure Communication Services

Key Takeaways

welcome to the introduction to azure communication services video my name is dan wallin i'm a cloud advocate at microsoft and this is going to be the first video in a series we're going to be doing on azure communication services and the different services that are available to you now in this first video i'm going to walk you through a few key scenarios where you could use azure communication services we'll talk about some different core services and then we're going to wrap up with how do you get started actually using this in your applications so let's go ahead and jump right in so when it comes to use cases for azure communication services there's a lot of them out there i'm going to walk you through four first off we know that telemedicine is becoming bigger and bigger these days a lot of folks want to stay at home to tell their doctor about their symptoms or tune in to hear about a diagnosis or whatever it may be and they like to do that from their mobile device or maybe just a browser on their computer that would be a scenario where you could have live audio video so they could talk back and forth with a doctor and get information another one would be remote services support you might have an individual working at a point of sale they're having a production problem let's say and need to talk to the help desk or whoever's providing the service for maybe a sale well if they could chat live in a two-way chat that would be helpful or again maybe they would use audio video for that another big one would be financial advisory you might have a global advisor who has clients all around the world they all speak different languages and they want to chat live in their own language and with azure communication services we could actually integrate with additional azure services to do live translation to other languages that way they can type in their language and the global advisor can still understand what they're saying or maybe they want to do live audio video calls and just chat directly well that would be another option here now the final one would be retail you've all hit that scenario where the holidays are coming there's a product you'd like to get but it's out of stock and you sign up to get notified either through sms or maybe just a recorded call is sent to you so that you can know when you can go to the site and pick up that product or maybe you want to be notified when a price has decreased a certain amount and you want to get that text message or call or whatever it may be well using azure communication services we can definitely take advantage of that particular scenario we can integrate with telephony with sms and do all kinds of things that would really help out our clients and our customers so they can buy that product they want now that's just four scenarios of many that we could talk about but now that we've covered some of those let's talk about so what are the key features in azure communication services that we could take advantage of then so whether it's these four scenarios or really any others that you can dream up you can reach your customers on this fully managed platform from a scalability standpoint this is built on the same technologies that microsoft teams actually uses which has millions and millions of active users and you're on azure which is a secure and a compliant cloud platform so you have all those benefits and guarantees as well so when it comes to course services here's the main ones you'll want to know about so first off voice and video you can integrate voice and video right into your web and to your mobile applications we also have chat and if you'd like to have that two-way live chat between customers or clients and the people at a help desk or people that are looking up inventory whatever it may be you could also build that with azure communication services in addition to those two we also have the ability to send sms messages out and even have two-way communication with messages if you'd like we can have telephony support where you can make calls out and even have two-way calls from an app get your own dedicated number work with other carrier networks and additional features that we'll talk about coming up and then you have network traversal not only will the communication platform here help you work with nat and firewall type scenarios but you can build on top of other carrier services and integrate with those do all kinds of fun things in your app that really just wasn't that easy to do on your own now when it comes to the core service details let's dive into each one of these services quickly here so first off voice and video capabilities allow you to integrate live audio calls or video calls over the internet and you can even analyze the call metadata record these calls and even interact with traditional phone numbers that are out there so you can have the app call out to numbers that are on different carriers around the world another really nice feature is the ability to integrate with microsoft teams this allows you to connect your custom map and a caller in that app or a client into an existing teams meeting so they can participate even though they may not be using teams at all now this is all built on a communications networking platform and it has built-in services such as turn where you can traverse using relays around nat and firewalls so that if you have clients that are behind these they can still use this service it's low latency and high throughput it works with web and mobile apps and it's built on the open source web rtc now if you have a custom client at work that you've already built or you're using some open source libraries out there you can bring those as well and add on top of this communications networking platform provided by azure communication services now i mentioned that chat is another capability you can actually host hundreds of users in a chat thread and as you're doing that you'll get a chat history that'll have the user chats and also system generated chat such as participants leaving and entering the chat you'll also have developer usage information and dashboard you can access about the chats going on and then what's really nice is you can also integrate with different types of notifications you could be notified for read receipts as a user as read something you can also have typing indicators so as they're typing that message there could be some type of an indicator showing to other chat participants and there's even more and more so there's a lot of great things when it comes to chat and if you need that it's something that's supported out of the box and what's really nice is you can even combine this with things like audio video if you want with all the mobile devices out there it's no surprise that sms is everywhere so one of the big features you can also take advantage of in azure communication services is the sms capabilities it's very easy to set up actually and you can send a high velocity of messages and what's nice is you could just send out messages just as notifications for example maybe the retail example i talked about earlier or you can have two-way communications if you'd like as well that's also a possibility there's analytics for these as well and users can even opt out so the opt-out handling is part of the overall apis and something you can also take advantage of and then finally we have telephony capabilities you can set up local toll-free numbers or even use short codes and this can be done with microsoft and carrier networks and you can buy one number or many numbers directly in the azure portal very very easy to get set up with your numbers fraud protection is built in and then there's different service desk and carrier options available as well for telephony so now that we've talked about some of the different scenarios we've gone through the core services let's wrap up by talking about how can you get started using azure communication services in your app well first off you can connect your users into your custom maps using flexible sdks that are provided by azure communication services these sdks require just a few lines of code in many cases to get the functionality we've talked about integrated you can bring your own identity when it comes to security and communications expertise isn't required you don't have to know about setting up all the telephony setting up what you would need for the audio video and webrtc and other features there it's part of the sdks that are available to simplify that for you everything is consumption based billing so you're only paying for the services that you actually use and then of course you can use all these features in the sdks to enhance your custom application so to wrap up i want to show you a document that's going to link us off to a storybook demo and this is a way to actually demo azure communication services right in the browser let's go ahead and jump to that so if we open the browser and go to aka dot ms slash acs ui library you'll see that we'll get to something called storybook and this is a way to run different components right in the browser and acs provides some really nice building blocks that you can use right out of the gate as a developer now i'm going to skip over these in this particular video but i want to mention them quickly so first off you have composites and these are complete solutions turnkey solutions as they say here that you can use to implement common scenarios and then you have ui components and these are more like puzzle pieces or lego building blocks that you can actually put together to build a more custom type of solution now while i'm not going to go into that here i am going to come down to the left and show you that we have quick starts and then composites and then here's the ui components actually i'm going to go to composites and go to chat we're going to go to the basic example now it's going to say please provide the connection string this is where you'd go into the docs learn about how to create an azure communication services resource in azure i'm not going to do that here but we will be covering that in a later video but once you set up that resource you're going to have access to a connection string so i have one that i'm going to paste in here and i'm going to go ahead and say my display name is dan w you'll notice it automatically sets up a chat scenario for us so i have dan w which is obviously me and then we have a simple bot that's going to respond now it looks like the bot has already added some messages here i'm going to go ahead and say hi how are you and that'll be my message and then we can obviously chat back and forth if this was a real person but that's how easy it is to actually get started with this and play with it now obviously from here you'd want to know how to implement it so you can click on the tab up here that says docs and this will provide a simple example to help get you started and if we come on down you're going to notice a chat composite down here so by adding this particular component we can now build on top of this to add in the different options that you see here you can theme it and do all kinds of fun things with it now they have other examples here as well there's also a call composite demo and if we go to canvas now i'll put my connection string in and my display name we'll finish that in a second it's going to say do you want to allow access to your mic do you want to allow access to camera all those fun type of things i'll go ahead and prove most of that now i don't have a great camera set up now i'm going to leave that off but i could unmute this is going to use my internal microphone because i'm using my main microphone to record this video but those are the type of things you can do right here in the browser so just by going to the azure portal setting up your azure communication resource you can get that connection string end point and then customize that and then i could actually start a call so there's a lot of great information here if you'd like so thanks for tuning in with me in this video on introduction to azure communication services i hope you have a much better idea about some of the core scenarios and core features that are available that you can use if you want to get started there's some excellent documentation available you can go to the link that you see here on your screen and i hope you'll check it out please also check out the other videos in this series