It’s been a little more than 4 months since the launch of our PhonoSDK Webphone at the jQuery Conference in Boston. While Web developers have been busy adding phones on web pages all over the Internet, our engineers have been hard at work on our new release internally known as “Echo Smasher”. The day has come to release Echo Smasher (version 0.2) in the wild!

So what’s new with PhonoSDK Version 0.2, you ask?

1. The biggest improvement is that headsets are no longer required! Sure, conversations still sound better with echo canceling headsets but you are no longer required to use a headset if you want to have a conversation with someone over the web browser. To facilitate this enhancement, we have introduced a new headset property that the user can click/set to control the user’s experience in the Web browser using jQuery.

We have implemented the new feature as a checkbox in our Kitchen Sink demo but you can implement the jQuery calls any way you like.  Here is what the new property looks like in code:

call.headset(true) or call.headset(false)

With call.headset set to true, we offer a full duplex user experience enabling both parties to speak simultaneously as you would normally do on a real telephone.  With call.headset set to false, we offer a half duplex user experience where we briefly mute the mic of the party speaking in millisecond intervals to reduce the echo caused by the sound being re-broadcasted over the listening party’s mic back to the speaker.  We default the headset to false in the API but you can override it at any time by issuing the jQuery call to update it.

2. We made improvements to our hosted Phono Gateway servers that handle the XMPP Jingle to SIP (and visa versa) translations.  These improvements resulted in even further reduced latency in conversations and we were able to stop the jitter that was prevalent on the first Phono call.

3. We also extended the support of PhonoSDK to all versions of IE, FireFox, Chrome, and Safari browsers. (Note: we are still working on Flash issues related to our Opera browser implementation but hope to have those updates released soon.)

Your existing Phono apps will still work fine; however, you will need to replace 0.1 with 0.2 in the PhonoSDK URLs to take advantage of the new version.  

<script src="http://s.phono.com/releases/0.2/jquery.phono.js"></script>

You will also need to add the call.headset(true) if you would like to take advantage of full duplex for headset users.

Please follow us on Twitter and let us know how you are using our PhonoSDK!

Originally from Voxeo Blogs