At Symbl.ai we are on a mission to make integrating AI for context-aware conversation understanding capabilities into your apps as easy as integrating SMS or billing features. In support of this mission, we are excited to unveil a new series of new updates and enhancements, which includes a new platform experience, interactive docs, a new developer community, and more. The goal is to help developers easily explore and integrate AI features such as auto summarization, sentiment analysis, topic modeling, user intent detection, unique conversation data classification and more.
We have also introduced our Web SDK to speed up development of web applications that can understand and generate real-time insights for streaming audio data.
Finally, we are doubling down on our commitment to our developer community by introducing a free developer plan that includes free monthly credits of up to 1,000 minutes and 10,000 words of text files.
New Developer Platform Experience
Once you are ready to log in to the Symbl developer platform, you will notice an improved onboarding experience. New users will especially find this new guided onboarding helpful, as you can make your first API call in less than a minute. You can also easily process audio and text conversations, and extract intelligence with a few clicks.
Once signed in to the developer platform, you will still see your Authentication (App ID and App Secret), as well as your current balance. But now you will notice links to explore new features, our prebuilt trackers library. And on the left you will find our navigation bar, which now includes two new items: Playground and API Explorer.
Playground
Playground is where new users will want to go once they sign in. Here developers can see key features in action before even having to make a single API call on their own.
This view shows the three conversation types you can process: streaming, async and telephony. Using sample conversations, it shows what data becomes available using Symbl, including summary, topics, transcription with sentiment analysis, as well as conversation analytics. You can also provide your own conversations or speak into the mic and process a conversation in real-time. Users will have access to insights, which include actions, follow ups, questions and trackers.
After you process a conversation, your session will be saved in the Playground, where you can access or share both a visual view as well as a code view of those sessions.
API Explorer
In the API Explorer, we expose you to all the Conversation APIs we have available. The Conversation API provides a REST API interface for getting your processed speech-to-text data and conversational insights. Once you choose an API, you will be able to see the steps involved, including obtaining an access token, processing a conversation, checking job status, and generating intelligence. Once you run a request, an access token is generated in the response section. The code snippets generated after each process can also be copied and used in your applications.
New Docs Experience
You may notice our documentation has undergone a major facelift. On the surface, our docs experience is brighter and more spaced out, creating a visual welcome space to help get you to the areas you are most interested in quickly. But what’s under the hood is even more impressive.
New Get Started Guide
We have revamped our Get Started section of our docs, to help you quickly get your App ID and App Secret and quickly get started using our APIs and features.
Interactive API Reference
Not only will you be able to learn about our APIs, you are now able to sign in to the Symbl.ai platform through the API reference and make calls right in our Docs page. Drop your App ID and App Secret in the API reference, and the page returns an access token.
You can then take that access token and immediately use it to submit a file. Just drop the access token into the interface, bring over an audio url, and retrieve your conversation ID and job ID. The API calls are logged, whether successful or not. Pulling up the history you can now find the associated conversation ID.
Our docs also provide an updated Postman guide and introduce new visual elements to help with different learning types. In order to get you using our APIs as SDKs as quickly and easily as possible, we have also introduced the Interactive API Reference.
Introducing Web SDK
We recently announced the Beta version of our Web SDK, and are now excited to announce its general release with even more functionality. Symbl’s WebSDK enables you to programmatically integrate real-time conversation intelligence capabilities for sentiment analysis, topic modeling, intent analysis, and live captioning into your applications.
Symbl’s Web SDK is an open-source kit that streamlines the development process for developers building applications with streaming audio using Symbl.ai’s Streaming API or Subscribe API. It does this by taking care of the WebSocket connections within the Symbl.ai platform, in line with the RFC 6455 standardized approach.
WebSDK supports JavaScript and TypeScript languages and lets you build web apps that can understand and generate real-time insights for streaming audio data.
And to automatically resolve connection issues, Web SDK now supports reconnection. If reconnectOnError is set to true in the SymblConfig, Web SDK attempts to reconnect after a break in connection.
Free Developer Plan
To empower the dev community, we are excited to offer a generous free plan – no credit card or calls with sales required to get started or go live. With 1,000 mins of audio and video conversation data and 10,000 words for text files – not to mention unlimited usage of our intelligence APIs on the developer platform – you can literally build and deploy product apps at no cost.
In addition to the free monthly credits, developers can process conversations in real-time or async on all channels. They can also process up to five conversations simultaneously.
When you upgrade to a pro account, your free credits are still available for you to use. Only when you exhaust your free minutes, will you be charged on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Symbl Dev Community
In order to help developers on their journey we also have introduced a community forum in addition to our public Slack channel. The Symbl Community is a discussion forum where builders can collaborate, share knowledge and best practices, and track previously made requests that sometimes get lost in Slack messages.
Advanced Conversation Understanding AI for your Apps
Some cloud vendors may do a good job offering generic ML-driven features, but do not offer models that are robust enough for complex tasks like understanding unstructured human to human conversations data generated from video, audio, and chat.
Symbl.ai platform users can easily explore and test out summarization, sentiments, topics, intents, and more–no credit card required.
Symbl is on a mission to make it easy for developers to integrate advanced conversation understanding AI into the applications they are building, and all of the updates mentioned in this post are the result of that commitment.
Get started building with Symbl today.
