Category Archives for Product Updates
Call Room Branding and Other New Features
We are excited to announce that in addition to branding the calls on your permanent links, you can now brand your room calls, too! Thanks to a new option on the Branding screen in your dashboard, you can have your default branding apply to any room calls that your account users join.
Note: The branding is applied to the room after the call is established. While the participants are waiting to connect, generic call background is shown.
Here is how to enable this feature:
- Navigate to the Branding screen in your account dashboard.
- Check the checkbox that says “Apply the default branding to all account users’ room calls”.
- Click “Save changes”.
- From now on, any room calls that your account users join will get branded with your account’s default branding (upon call establishment).
In addition to call room branding and miscellaneous bug fixes, we have also added the following features:
- Voice-only call links: Append the
?startcall=voiceparameter to your links to make the call start with the camera off. For example:https://www.gruveo.com/@acme?startcall=voice. This works for both room and permanent link calls. - Purging of the call log: The new “Purge call log” link on the Call Log screen lets you permanently delete the call log for your account.
We hope that you find these new features useful. As usual, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us if you have any questions or need support.
New in Gruveo: Call Log, Dashboard by Default and Other Major Improvements
The past couple of months have been very busy for us at Gruveo. Our usage has increased significantly, and the feedback we have been receiving from new and existing users alike has been truly invaluable.
We have been working hard to address the biggest Gruveo pain points, and we are happy to announce the release of a new milestone that adds major improvements to the Gruveo web application. Here are some of the highlights.
Dashboard by Default
Before the today’s update, logging in to Gruveo brought you back to our homepage, from where you had to click your name and then “Settings” to get to the dashboard. Not anymore! You now get to your dashboard immediately after logging in.
The New “Set up a Call” Page
You spoke, and we listened. With the two options for setting up a call on Gruveo (permanent links vs. call rooms), it can be hard to decide which one you should be using for your next conversation.
That’s why we have added the new Set up a Call page to the dashboard. This page lays out your options in a clear and understandable manner, as well as lists all your permanent links and lets you generate a call room link with one click. No more confusion!
Create Room Links Right in Your Dashboard
We used to recommend our browser extension as the easiest way to generate room links. Now you can create room links right in your dashboard from the “Set up a Call” page.
The new room link generator lets you create a random link, copy it to your clipboard as well as go to the call room. You can type in a custom link, too!
Goodbye, the Dialer on the Homepage
With the new “Set up a Call” page in place, we have removed the option to start a Gruveo call on our homepage by typing in the room name or the permanent link.
Call Log and Incoming Calls Report
Accessing the call log and getting reports on the incoming Gruveo calls has been one of the past few months’ most requested features.
The new Call Log page in the admin user’s dashboard displays a log of all incoming calls across the Gruveo account. You can see the call date/time, link called, caller location, call status (missed/declined/answered), who answered the call, as well as call duration.
On top of that, the Call Log page lets you export the data for the selected date range to a CSV or Excel file.
The Incoming Calls Report page breaks down incoming call statistics per permanent link, with data such as total incoming calls, missed calls, declined calls, answered calls and total call duration.
Call Reporting via Webhooks and Custom Call Tracking (Experimental)
For the customers interested in receiving their call statistics in real time, we have added the ability to post call information to a custom webhook at the end of each call. You can use this feature with e.g. Zapier webhooks to trigger actions for each incoming Gruveo call in your account.
The data posted to the webhook includes call date/time, link called, caller location, call status, who answered the call, call duration and more. On top of that, any custom GET parameters you add to a permanent Gruveo link (for example, https://www.gruveo.com/@mybusiness?param1=123¶m2=456), will be reported in the webhook as well.
Please get in touch with us if you’d like to try the new webhook reporting feature.
Profile and Billing Moved to Drop-Down Menu
As we’re adding more features to the user dashboard, we decided to move a few critical items to the user drop-down menu. This is where you will now find the Profile and Billing links:
More to Come
We hope you will find these new features useful. Our team remains committed to further improving Gruveo, so expect more new features soon!
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!