[MUSIC].
>> Joining me now is going to be Bob Serr,
Partner GM of Engineering
for Azure Communication Services.
I think we have him on the line
and the communication link is okay.
Bob, thanks for being here.
>> Thanks for having me, Rick.
I'm super excited to be here.
>> I know that we previewed and talked about
Azure Communication Services at
Microsoft Ignite earlier in the year,
but we're here today because we're
actually achieving a GA milestone.
Can you actually share a little bit about for
those people that don't
know what Azure Communication Services is,
what it's all about?
>> Sure. Azure Communication Services
is a communication platform as a service.
It's an Azure offering focused at
developers who want to use APIs and
software development kits to embed
communications inside of
their applications and workflows.
The great thing about it is that it's built on
the same infrastructure that powers Microsoft Teams.
If you think about it,
Microsoft Teams currently powers
over 145 million daily active users
every single day in a very secure,
compliant, robust, geographically scaled system.
As a developer, you can come in
and not have to worry about all that complexity.
We announced
our general availability recently as you mentioned,
and we started with four
communication primitives so far; Calling, chat,
SMS texting, and traditional PSTN landline calling.
>> Developers can now go in and
leverage those inside their applications
and work them into
their current flow for what they're
trying to do with that particular application.
What things can we do with
the changes for what's
available inside of Azure Communication Services?
Actually, I will even simplify this even better.
I'm going to throw this a little bit different and simply
ask you for some examples of a couple
of ways that developers have actually created
different applications using
Azure Communication Services.
>> Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple of things.
First of all, we've learned from our customers
that the ability to build a
consumer-facing or
an external-facing custom application
that will allow our customers,
external customers to talk to
their Teams users who are
inside the company is super important.
We've already talked about Teams Interop
but we're announcing at Build that you
can basically get that Teams
leg of the conversation for free as a developer.
You don't have to pay for that leg
twice, which is awesome.
There's a few of the things before I show you an example.
We have a couple of things that
we've made it easier for developers to build.
Instead of having developers have to go and
build all of the communication UI,
basically, we've launched the UI library for developers.
>> Okay.
>> We've added additional SDKs
for developing it on Windows.
We also are making it easier
to save artifacts for those calls.
Now you can add call recording, for example,
if you want to have a recording of
every call or meeting that happens to the system.
Then we're making our infrastructure robust
for enterprises that already
have calling plans, for example,
and so we have direct routing if you
have some type of SIP router for
your calling plans and you can just connect that
into the existing Azure Communication Services system.
Then the final thing is that
we're adding network traversal.
If you have custom media and
you want to be able to span networks,
it's something that we're very good at,
and again, you don't have to worry
about all that complexity.
But you asked about examples.
Some of the examples that we're
seeing are a lot of virtual visits,
as you can imagine in the times that we're in right now,
where some examples would
be a virtual visit with a patient or maybe like
a team of providers that are
providing care for a patient and their family.
That team might be physicians
that already have a Microsoft Teams calling plan
and then the customers are going to
be joining via a mobile browser, for example.
I'll just show you over here.
The first thing to do is go check out
Azure Communications Services in Azure.
You can learn all about what we do,
and then from there,
if you want to go take a look at some of the code,
then we have some really nice samples there.
What I've done here is I've taken this group
calling sample and I
built already a deployed site
where this is now running on my server.
What I'm going to do is this could be,
let's say a hospital organization
has a booking system where
the automated and sent a text that reminded me of
the call with a link and I
clicked into this link as a patient.
Now I'm going to join into
a conversation first by letting the doctor
know who I am and then starting to call.
Turn on my video. Now I'm
going to join in the call and then
here you'll see me twice.
Basically, in this view
here where I'm looking at the camera,
I'm the provider or the physician
that's communicating via Microsoft Teams,
and on this view here,
I'm in my browser, which happens to be on my desktop,
but it could be a mobile browser and it could be embedded
inside of my hospital app or my bookings app.
That's an example of that virtual
visit concept where I can have
a very highly tailored experience that
will connect into my existing Teams infrastructure.
>> That was a super fast whirlwind demo.
That was really, really cool.
I just want to unpack that for a second.
All the code is available on the GitHub repo for
Azure Communication Services to be able to
go off and try that yourself right now,
built on top of ACS.
Then you can just literally plug that in
using ACS to go off and facilitate that connection.
I could barely see on the screen,
but you actually just put in
the Teams meeting information in
that sample piece of code and you join
this particular session from that web browser.
>> That's exactly right. Think about it.
The Teams infrastructure or
the infrastructure that Azure Communication Services
sits on top of already
has the ability to communicate globally.
We can traverse networks,
we can handle different types of fidelity of networks,
and so as a developer,
by looking at that code sample on GitHub,
I can either build in a Windows SDK, iOS, Android.
In this case, I use JavaScript.
With a few lines of code,
I can embed that exact same experience in my website,
and then all I have to do is using
the APIs to populate the team's eating information,
which I could have automated the creation
of that meeting using the graph
API so that the whole thing can be done through code.
As a developer, I don't
have to worry about the complexity
of how to build all the
infrastructure that runs underneath it.
>> This is so cool. It is like
a communications platform as a service,
like you said at the beginning, I had no idea
that we had the ability to plug
into this. This is awesome.
You've given us some ideas on where
we can go off and try some of that sample code.
Now, I know that there's
no big long session specifically here at Build that we
can go off and see because ACS and the stuff that you're
talking about now pop up up
a couple of different sessions. That's right?
>> That's right. I think the best place to go
is go take a look at Jeff Teper's keynote.
It's build the next generation of collaborative apps for
hybrid work and it shows
that experience of building inside of Teams,
outside of Teams and
augmenting that with Azure Communication Services.
>> Awesome. Thank you very much.
I actually think that one's coming up next on
the main player or the main page,
but you know what Bob?
Thank you so much for taking time out of your day.
Have a great Microsoft Build.