Category Archives for Product Updates
Exciting Improvements to Call Recording
We have recently rolled out a series of exciting improvements to call recording functionality. Gruveo now lets you have your recordings saved to Dropbox or Google Drive, as well as automatically start the recording for each call.
Dropbox and Google Drive Support
In addition to storing of up to 5 GB of recordings in your Gruveo account, you now have the option to save any recordings you make to Dropbox or Google Drive. To switch the storage for your recordings, do the following:
- Go to the Call Recordings page in your Gruveo account
- Choose the desired storage option in the “Storage” drop-down box
- Follow the instructions to connect your Dropbox or Google Drive account
- Click “Save changes”.
The new storage option will apply to any subsequent call recordings you make.
Automatic Call Recording
It’s now easy to have your Gruveo calls recorded by default, too. To enable automatic recording, go to your Call Recordings page, check the checkbox next to “Automatically start recording for each call” and then “Save changes”. From now on, call recording will be automatically started for each of your Gruveo conversations. You will still have the option to turn off the recording during the call.
We are happy to be releasing these new call recording features, and we look forward to you putting them to some good use in your business! Head to our Help Center to learn more.
New Feature: Per-Handle Branding
We have expanded Gruveo’s branding capabilities to let you set different branding images for each of your Gruveo handles. Here is how it works:
- You specify the default branding that applies to all of your handles by default.
- You then override the branding images for handles as necessary.
As an example, suppose that your sales team has the gruveo.com/@acme.sales link assigned, and then Mike Smith from Sales is also reachable via his personal link at gruveo.com/@acme.smith.
It makes sense to include your company logo in the default branding so that’s what will be shown when someone calls gruveo.com/@acme.sales:
You can then override the branding for Mike’s personal handle to show Mike’s photo instead of the company logo. That way, anyone calling gruveo.com/@acme.smith will see this:
Please see our Help Center for the details on how to set your default branding and then override it for individual handles. Happy branding!
Announcing Call Queueing
We are happy to announce the arrival of the call queueing functionality to Gruveo. It has been one of our most-requested features for a long time, and now it’s available at no additional cost to all team-enabled Gruveo accounts.
What Is Call Queueing?
Call queueing puts your callers in a waiting queue until the next representative becomes available to answer the call. Before today’s update, a customer calling your Gruveo link would get a “User unavailable” message if all of your operators were busy with other calls. Not anymore!
The caller gets shown their position in the queue, updated in real time. If they decide not to wait and hang up, they will still be invited to leave you a message (requires the Text Mail feature to be enabled in your account). Likewise, your operators get to see the number of callers currently in the queue.
Do I Need to Enable Call Queueing in My Account?
Call queueing is automatically available to all team-enabled Gruveo accounts. To check if your account is team-enabled, do the following:
- Log into your account on www.gruveo.com
- Click your name in the upper right corner, then Settings
- Check if there is the “Users” item in the menu to the left. If it is, then your account is team-enabled and call queueing will work for you.
If your Gruveo account is not team-enabled, please get in touch so we can help you with the upgrade.
We are super excited to be launching this new feature and can’t wait to hear your feedback!
Announcement: Introducing New Pricing Plan and Product Update
At Gruveo, we’re always listening to our customers to build features that they need to succeed in this modern age of seamless video conferencing. Today we are excited to announce a new pricing plan and feature update – team management which enables our customers to manage their accounts more effectively.
What this means for a Gruveo user
Once you sign up for a Gruveo account (identified by the email entered during registration), you will automatically become the account admin. By default, there will be two types of users: admins and non-admins.
Admin users will have the following additional privileges:
- Ability to manage the account’s users and handles
- Access to the account billing.
Manage your company account effectively
Previously, you would need to create a new Gruveo account for yourself even if your team member is already a Gruveo user. Now, you can easily assign links and allocate users to every member in your team to centralize billing. For example, as the CPO of esurance, you can now allocate the Gruveo link https://grv.to/@esurance.sales and assign it to each of your sales reps under one account. Gruveo makes it easier than ever to seamlessly support modern video experiences and software demonstrations!
How it works: User allocation and removal
When you go to the users settings page, you can see table of the account users with the following information:
- Real name
- Invitation status (Invited, Active)
- Removal button
To invite a user, all you need to do is enter the name and email address. Your team member will then receive an email from Gruveo with a signup link. Once the user clicks on the link, the user will be able to complete the signup process by creating their account password.
Estimate your plan better
With this new update, we decided to make changes to our pricing plan so that you can choose the right plan for your business. Effective immediately, we will be offering a flexible subscription which you can add or remove Gruveo links in your account at any time. Our plan starts at $29/month and scales accordingly. Start your free 14-day trial now.
Check out our new pricing plan here.
If you are an existing Gruveo customer and would like to get access to the team management functionality, please get in touch with us.
* A Gruveo link is a shareable link that lets you easily invite others to video call you. Your callers don’t need to download or sign up for an account. You can add or remove Gruveo links in your account any time.
Now Available: Tiled Layout for Your Call Recordings
Up till now, Gruveo has supported a single layout for call recordings where the active speaker’s picture was automatically maximized to occupy most of the screen space. This has worked for a lot of our customers, but some were missing an option to have all call participants shown in pictures of about the same size, without the switching.
We are happy to announce that Gruveo now offers the option to use the “tiled” layout for call recordings that tiles the participant images on the screen. The new layout is available to all Gruveo users immediately. Check out the images below to compare the two layouts:
In the new “tiled” layout, all of the participants’ pictures are shown in about the same size on the recording.
The original “maximized” layout automatically maximizes the image of the current active speaker.
To use the tiled layout for your call recordings, go to your Call Recordings page, choose “Tiled” for the layout and click “Save Changes”. The new layout will apply to any subsequent call recordings you make. Please see our Help Center for details.
Gruveo for Developers
The tiled recording layout is available to the Gruveo Embed API users via the new optional layout parameter to the embed.toggleRecording() method. To set the layout of the recording, pass maximized (default) or tiled in the layout parameter when the recording is started. For more information, please see our JavaScript API Reference.
Support for setting the recording layout in the Gruveo SDKs for iOS and Android is underway and will be released soon.
Happy recording!
Screen Sharing Support Lands in the Embed API
Gruveo developers, rejoice! The Gruveo Embed API now supports outgoing screen sharing in Chrome and Firefox on desktop. In Chrome, the user will be prompted to install the Gruveo Screen Sharing extension when turning on the screen sharing for the first time. In Firefox, no extension installation is necessary.
To provide access to this new functionality, we have added the new screenSharingAvailability event to the API, as well as extended the existing embed.toggleVideo() method and the streamStateChange event. Please refer to the JavaScript API Reference for details. We have also updated our Basic Demo to provide an example of how you can access the screen sharing functionality through the Embed API.
The screen sharing feature is available to all Embed API users immediately. Like before, displaying incoming screen sharing streams is available on all platforms supported by the Embed API.
New Feature: Add Callers to Your Ongoing Gruveo Call
If you use Gruveo often (we hope you do!), you probably want to be alerted of any incoming calls even while you are on a call with someone else. Additionally, you should be able to add new callers right to the ongoing call, without having to use a room for such impromptu group conversations. Well, starting today, you can do both.
Get Alerts for Parallel Incoming Calls
Whenever you have an ongoing Gruveo conversation and a new call on your Gruveo link comes in, you will now get an alert like the one shown below.
A special alert will notify you of a parallel incoming call (Gruveo web app only).
The alert will give you two options:
- Add the caller to your ongoing call
- Decline the incoming call.
You can also hang up your ongoing call, in which case you will be taken to the incoming call screen for the caller who’s trying to reach you.
Another Easy Way to Create Group Conversations
The call notification feature provides a new easy way to create group calls on Gruveo. Instead of organizing your group call in a call room, or sharing the one-time join URL for an ongoing call on your Gruveo link, do the following:
- Tell all call participants to follow your Gruveo link (grv.to/@myhandle) on the agreed upon time
- Take the first call that comes in
- Add any subsequent callers to the ongoing call.
It’s really that simple!
Available in the Gruveo Web App Today
The new call notification feature is currently available in the Gruveo web app on www.gruveo.com. We are working on bringing it to our Android and iOS apps, too. Meanwhile, here’s to even fewer missed calls and a new easy way to create group conversations on Gruveo!