Published on April 16th, 2021 | by Sunit Nandi

The Benefits of Integrating Audio Call API

An audio call API allows businesses and individuals to integrate audio call functions into an existing application or software, or to add audio call into a brand new app without the hassle of a lengthy software development process and the difficulties of hosting and managing our own app.

Audio call, or voice chat, is a method of internet communication by utilizing the Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), allowing the users to perform voice-based communications to virtually anywhere in the world for free (besides the cost for internet connectivity).

Businesses can use audio call functions for various different purposes from enabling seamless internal communications to allowing functional voice chat between remote employees separated by thousands of miles from each other. In short, audio call API can save both the organization and employees a significant amount of time, resources, and money.

What is Audio Call API

First, we have to understand what API is before we can fully understand the concept of audio call API.

API stands for Application Programming Interface, which is a software or program that essentially acts as a bridge, an interface so that two or more applications can ‘talk’ to each other (or for an application and a hardware tool to communicate with each other). The API creates a structure of interaction

This allows, for example, application A to get the features of application B, or vice versa, and in the case of audio call API, we can integrate the audio call and voice chat functionalities (and other features included in the API) into another application.

In practice, businesses can integrate their own application that has the brand’s logo, brand’s colors, and other branding elements with audio call functionalities provided by API-enabled audio call applications like Iotum.

Integrating audio call API, however, isn’t solely about versatility in branding the application, but businesses can also add custom features and functionalities to better meet the organization’s needs, meeting compliance requirements and regulations, and serve your customers better.

In short, using audio call APIs can be an accessible and affordable way to get your own custom-tailored application for voice chat and audio conference.

Why You Need Audio Call API

Say your business just decided that you need an audio call application/software. In such cases, basically, we have three different options:

Building your solution from scratch

The option that will provide the most freedom and versatility is to build your own audio call application from scratch. However, this option requires you to either have an adequate programming skill/experience or the budget to hire an experienced software developer, which can be expensive.

Not to mention, even if you do have the budget, developing your own app can take a long time, especially if we also consider the testing period to ensure the application is functioning as desired and/or meeting the compliance requirements.

Using readymade third-party solutions

Another viable solution is to use various off-the-shelf audio call applications like Skype, Discord, Zoom, and others. You can use these solutions right away, as most of them are very accessible and affordable (or even totally free), but you’ll also get very limited freedom in customization. Also, in some cases, there’ll be a steep learning curve involved if you want to use all the functionalities of the product.

Integrating audio call API

Integrating an audio call API essentially allows you to get the best of both worlds: you can get the customizability of building your application from scratch but avoids the hassle of developing, hosting, and managing your own software solution.

Common Use Cases for Audio Call API Integration

Marketing and promotion

With how saturated the digital marketing space is, using audio call functions can help enhance your marketing campaign to win your customer’s attention amidst all the noises. You can, for example, tell a customer to leave a missed call on a designated number if they are interested in information about your product/service, and you can call the customer back with the audio call API.

Reminder

For example, in subscription-based businesses, banking, insurance, and others, audio-based payment reminders add a touch of personalization of politeness. With the audio call API, we can set up automated audio call reminders with certain parameters, for example for those who missed payments by a certain number of days.

Travel updates

For travel agents and other travel-related businesses, we can set up automated phone calls to inform the time of flight departure, changes in itinerary, and other details.

Healthcare

Integrating audio call API in healthcare applications allow healthcare providers to be able to access critical information easily. The in-app audio call can allow various functions like automatically calling patients to remind/confirm an appointment, using voice-to-text (and vice versa) to notify doctors with text messages upon confirmation, and other features that can significantly save a significant amount of time and effort otherwise required in manual interactions.

Education

Real-time voice communication is essential with the growing demand for remote learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. With audio call API, teachers, for example, can call students from within the e-learning application right away and connect with multiple students at once. Teachers can also use features like broadcasting text notifications to update the class schedule to students and parents, all of these without compromising security and data privacy.

Conclusion

The integration of audio APIs can allow businesses to have a custom-tailored audio call application without needing to build their own solution from scratch. Thus, the business can get the benefits of a fully customized audio call application while eliminating the hassle of the lengthy development process and the difficulty of hosting and managing your own application.

Tags: audio call API, benefits, integrating

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.