We’re excited to bring you the details about our latest update to Circuit with Sprint 134 and its focus on call efficiency and control and bringing more utility to both published and real-time content.

Let’s first start with four key advancements we’ve made to the call stage (don’t forget to turn the new call stage on in Circuit Labs).

Call quality indicator

We’re all familiar with bars and signal indicators letting us know about the quality of our cellular or WIFI connection, but they don’t really inform us of network congestion or other factors that impact call quality. To help, Circuit now displays a call quality indicator that behaves a little like radar. It gives you the status of Circuit’s connection quality, so you know if your collaboration session is at risk of connection issues. The indicator is especially valuable when you’re on the move, giving you guidance about connection strength while you roam … more bars = better quality. It also helps users let other participants know of potential quality issues, removing the doubt of “is it on their end”.  And to help with troubleshoot we’ve already put plans in place to include detailed statistics – look for that announcement very soon.

Screenshare snapshots

We heard that users wanted more interaction options with real-time events. The pain of having to navigating away to take screenshots during screen sharing sessions was particularly troublesome, so we’ve embedded this capability into Circuit.

Users can now take screenshots during screen sharing sessions, save them locally, publish them directly into the conversation or start a whiteboard session. Now you have more ways to contribute, participate and engaging with content.

Configure the call stage the way you want it

We’ve expanded the pinning capabilities of the bottom ribbon of Circuit to accept any participant, regardless if they’re showing video or not. Now you can ready ahead of time and pin participants prior to sharing video. All participants are now found along a newly expanded side bar.

Who’s talking?

We’ve added more living features to the active speaker pop up, so rolling over shows their name.

And we found it was in the way with other interface options where it was appearing, so it’s now found in the upper right corner.

Giving content more life

We’ve brought simple but powerful options to published content giving it more life and more utility. Now you can link existing posts and content to other conversations helping reduce duplication while bringing ideas and streams together (personally, I love this!).

Collaboration ecosystem expansion

Office 365

Circuit users can now integrate to and move emails, create meetings, add conversations and conferences from the web version of Office 365.

Plantronics Status Indicator

We’ve expanded our IoT connectivity options to include Plantronics Status Indicator, offering visual or audio presence indication to help users keep focus, reduce interruptions or quickly identify available resources.

More from Circuit Labs

“Teams” call feature

We’ve taken another page from our call control experience and created Teams – an “pick-up-group like” feature that supports both SIP and Circuit (WebRTC) calls.

To ensure important calls are answered, a Team is your back up, and alerts members if you aren’t available to take that call. It brings together users and timing rules to trigger alerts to Team members who can choose to accept or decline the call. If declined the call continues to alert other Team members. All interactions are then captured in the call journal – who tried to call, who was alerted and who ultimately took the call. A powerful, easy to use tool for those calls that just need to be answered.

And there you have it!

More interactive ways to connect to people, things and data so collaboration is more meaningful. It’s a pleasure to bring you up to speed on Circuit’s latest developments. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out!