We are excited to announce the beta launch of the Bubble video chat plugin, powered by Twilio! Now, more than ever, it’s important to stay connected to each other. Our hope is that this plugin will help with this effort. The video chat plugin enables you to add highly-customizable video chat windows to your app, and it’s white-label, so you can make it completely your own with ease. In the time of social distancing, we hope this latest plugin will help you build virtual communities, communicate with customers, and provide a way to stay connected through the web.
Getting Started
To get started, install the video chat plugin in your Plugins tab. Then, navigate to https://www.twilio.com/ and sign up for a Twilio account. This is the account you will use to pay for and manage your video chat functionality.
Once you have signed up for an account, you’ll need to fill out the required information for the plugin in the Settings panel.
You can find the necessary information in your Twilio account console. Your Account SID and Auth Token can be found on the main page of your project dashboard, seen below:
You will then need to generate a new API Key to fill out the “API Key: SID” and “API Key: Secret” fields in the plugin panel. In order to generate an API Key, go to the Settings tab in the Twilio console, then to the API Keys section.
Create a new API Key, giving it whatever name suits you, and copy the SID and Secret to the plugin settings in your Bubble editor.
After that, you’re all set! You can explore the plugin functionality and add video chat to your app right away. If you want to check on your chat rooms, recordings, compositions, or usage, you can do so in the Twilio console under the “Programmable Video” section.
The video chat plugin allows you to draw a video chat window in the design tab and control your chat room through workflow actions. You can start, join, leave, and end rooms, as well as provide the capability to hide/show video, mute/unmute your microphone, or share/stop sharing your screen.
To create a room, you must provide a unique room name and select a room size. You can choose from three room sizes: One-on-one, small group, or group. One-on-one calls are encrypted, allowing for heightened security; these chats cannot be recorded. Small group rooms can hold up to four participants and are less expensive to run than regular group rooms. Group rooms can hold up to 50 people, allowing you to host larger chats, conferences, or presentations.
For small group and group rooms, you have the option to record the call. Twilio “recordings” are not viewer-friendly files - in order to turn a recording into a viewer-friendly MP4 file, you must generate what Twilio calls a “composition”. Luckily, you can do so easily with the “Retrieve Composition” action, which will generate and retrieve a link to a viewer-friendly MP4 file which you can save to a Bubble Thing or view in the Compositions tab of your Twilio console.
We hope you enjoy using this plugin to add video chat to your Bubble apps. No matter where you are in the world, stay safe, stay creative, and stay connected to each other!