I recently spoke with Steve Sokol, friend to Asterisk users and Digium lead, about the new initiative, Respoke. Respoke is a Communications Platform As A Service [PAAS] suite of WebRTC with a browser based API and mobile app development libraries.
Respoke addresses the requirements of Web developers and while there are interfaces and capabilities that can tie into the existing Asterisk / Digium community, the suite delivers peer to peer voice, video and data that can be used without ever connecting to the telephone mindset.
The platform supports Turn so that issues of NAT Traversal can be overcome when needed endpoints are masked. If interconnection is desired a “chan respoke” capability that allows sessions between services. The platform also supports group messaging.
Internal to the system, like WebRTC, phone numbers are not a requirement, and developers can use identities specific to their needs. The libraries include key features such as:
- Screen / desktop sharing
- Individual and group messaging (IM)
- Peer-to-peer data delivery
- PubSub / data update
- Presence
- Peer identity / discovery
- Media relay (TURN)
- Inbound calls from traditional phones
- Outbound calls to traditional phone numbers
- Access Control / Permissions
- WebRTC audio / video calling
Pricing starts at free and evaluation and trials are also free. Once in operation, the solution has a simple three tier pricing model based on concurrent connections and bandwidth.
So far, the community has built mobile apps, collaboration solutions and multimedia Websites, but just like the Web, innovation abounds.
Edited by
Stefania Viscusi
