SightCall Fall Release Update

The SightCall team is excited to announce our Fall 2020 release. This release contains several important updates that have been requested by our users. With this update organizations can expect to see improvements that will help them to deliver better service. Here is what’s coming in this release:

Multiparty SightCall sessions are useful when dealing with multiple people needed remote guidance or for on-the-job peer training of new technicians. The SightCall multiparty capability has been enhanced and now includes a number of new features that were previously only available in two-party calls.

• Role Change – There are two types of users who attend multiparty calls, guests and attendees. Guest users work directly with the agent and receive the remote assistance from the agent. Attendees attend multiparty calls with two-way audio and video only. With this new release the agent can change the role of any attendee to that of a guest. This allows an agent to deliver remote assistance to all parties in a multiparty call.
• Moderation – The agent now has the ability to moderate the multiparty call. This includes the ability to invite both guests and attendees into a call. Mute the microphone of anyone in the call if the audio becomes disruptive. The agent can also disconnect anyone from the call if needed.
• Chat – Chat is a useful mode of communication to share text information or communicate when noise levels make voice communications difficult. All parties in a multiparty call can now chat with each other via text chat tool.
• OCR – Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used to convert any text seen in the live video stream into usable text, thus eliminating manual transcription of text. Agents can now use the OCR tool when in two-party and multiparty calls.

• Screen Share – Screen share is a useful way to show information from a computer or mobile device. Both agents and guests can now share their screen during a multiparty call and it can be viewed by everyone in the call.

Organizations are conducting visual assistance sessions for an increasing number of self-service customer use cases. This means more users connecting with SightCall who have never used it before. Organizations want to make it as easy as possible for customers to join sessions. We’ve made several enhancements to our WebRTC support to streamline the process of joining and eliminate the need to install any software.

• Streamlined User Experience – The user experience for joining a conference is easier and consistent no matter how a user joins a SightCall session. This simplifies the join process.
• Mixed Conferences – SightCall sessions can now include a mix of participants using the Visual Support app or WebRTC in the same conference. This lets participants join in their preferred method.
• SightCall App Compatibility – If you are an agent on the go using the SightCall mobile agent app, guests can now join the SightCall session with WebRTC without downloading any software.

A key capability used during SightCall sessions is the ability to annotate over the video image. This is an indispensable tool for the remote expert by allowing proper guidance and precise communication. While SightCall has long had annotations available, we are dramatically improving annotations.

Remote experts can live annotate on the video image using a variety of new shapes, symbols, and animated tools. This makes communication much more effective than verbal communication alone.

This release lays the ground work for the advanced annotations. The advanced annotations feature will be available later this year and will require updated plugin and mobile apps.

In addition to the updates mentioned above, we have a number of additional updates contained in this release to improve the SightCall platform.

• Agent Poll – We’ve added the ability to issue a poll questions to agent and collect the feedback within the SightCall dashboard.
• Waiting Room Improvements – When using SightCall with Salesforce, its possible to direct users to a meeting room while waiting for their agent to join the SightCall session.
• Updated API Documentation – We’ve updated the API documentation with the latest APIs for building custom apps using SightCall.