Connect and scale - simple.

OpenTalk supports customization of logo and colors to fit your corporte identity. Presets and features can be configured system-wide, client-by-client, or at an individual level, per conference. Giving you the flexibility to brand OpenTalk to suit your needs.

The Dashboard presents important information in a structured fashion. This includes all scheduled meetings (your own and those you are invited to attend), clearly presented and arranged in a calendar view.

Recurring or important meetings can be highlighted and accessed through dashboard shortcuts. New meetings can be created instantly, using predefined templates.

Offboarding (Roadmap)

Once a conference is over, the organizing team will sometimes perform a concluding evaluation, also called "off-boarding". OpenTalk supports such activities and if enabled, all presenters and VIPs can remain in a conference session after it has ended for regular participants.

 

Session recording

Video and audio streams can be recorded after consent has been obtained by all attendees of a session. The related media files can then be downloaded afterwards.

Our roadmap: The whiteboard and chat contents can be included in a recording.

 

Playlist auto moderation (Roadmap)

OpenTalk can keep track of speaking times, even if there are many participants in a session, and automatically call everyone in turn to contribute. While one participant is still speaking, the next speaker will receive a visual indication that they are up next. Helping you to conduct meetings efficiently without confusion - that's OpenTalk.

Participants who are added later will be included in the current list of speakers appropriately, or automatically added to the end of the list. A moderator can also manually rearrange the list of participants to allow individuals to speak earlier or later, if required.

 

Voting & polls 

Polls can be used to quickly gauge opinions, run a question and answer session in class, or as a way to add variety to activities.

OpenTalk offers polls where answer options include free text input, yes/no, or a selection of predefined answers. These can also be prepared in advance and presented as required to enable lively and hassle-free moderation.

 

Wheel of names (Roadmap)

Who is up next? With our "Wheel of names", you can leave it to chance to decide. A fun feature that can introduce excitement and entertainment in the classroom.

But the wheel of names can do more: If the objective is that no one is to be left out of the conversation, the wheel can ensure that those who have already spoken will not be called up again.

 

Ball of yarn (Roadmap)

Effective team building: Any experienced team seminar leader knows the so-called "ball of yarn" activity, which is often used for welcoming and introducing participants who do not know each other yet.

After offering their own introduction, the current speaker will hold on to the string and throw the ball of yarn towards another person in the meeting, whose time it is to speak - over time, this will create a web of yarn between all participants. When the last person has had their say and introductions are finished, everyone ends up connected to everyone else.

If a conference requires discussion to continue in smaller groups, OpenTalk will assist with the setup of break-out rooms and the assigning of participants. Rooms can be automatically created according to a range of different parameters. When group functions are used, the corresponding group rooms can be prepared in advance and participants assigned automatically.

Meanwhile, the conference moderators have everything under control: They can be called for assistance at any time and visit breakout rooms as required. A central event console gives access to all messages and advanced moderation features.

OpenTalk comes with a dedicated telephony feature - beside using the regular client over the Internet, participants can also dial in using a regular phone (audio only). OpenTalk can also be connected as a SIP client to an existing in-house telephone system or an external SIP provider. By doing so, conferences can be allocated a dedicated telephone number, and participants can dial in exclusively by phone or in combination with a computer that uses an Internet connection.

On our roadmap:

Future support for multiple phone numbers per conference, to offer dial-in worldwide. Registered participants to be automatically identified by their telephone number, and to have their name displayed accordingly.

Video streams can be exported to external streaming providers. Primarily, RTMP(S) is used, which is supported by Youtube and many other streaming services. As an alternative to exporting to an external service, OpenTalk also provides a dedicated light-weight streaming server that can be accessed through a web browser. All available authentication options can be implemented, if required. On request, features such as a "chat board", or "question board" can be implemented for external participants, while passive stream participants can submit questions to the moderator outside of the "official" stream of chat messages.

OpenTalk is made for providers. Clear interfaces allow for clean integration, straightforward management of permissions, and flexible configuration options per customer or conference. This includes flexible billing options like basic, premium and enterprise packages as well as reporting.

Using well-defined interfaces and APIs, all kinds of qualitative and quantitative metrics can be retrieved from the OpenTalk platform for monitoring and performance analytics. 

OpenTalk allows you to stay on top of all mission-critical indicators: Server health, available resources and consumption by container, participant numbers per conference, number of connections, reconnects, other events, usage time, and many more.

Good reporting and meaningful statistics show the current status and predicts future situations, so that impending bottlenecks can be identified at an early stage and available resources allocated accordingly.

For OpenTalk, a completely new architecture was developed from scratch that offers the latest in security, authentication, encryption, scalability, and flexibility: A state-of-the-art architecture from the 2020s.

Since clients subscribe and receive only those video streams that are currently played back, the feeds of those participants that are not displayed have only negligible impact on client scale-out in terms of computing resources and bandwidth. On the server side, they generate incoming bandwidth, but computing-wise, OpenTalk scales very efficiently since there is no image processing required on the server side.

Since any number of video bridges can be used, and each conference is launched in its own container on a horizontally scalable Kubernetes infrastructure, large scale-out will only be limited by the provision of further Kubernetes nodes by the operator. There is support for utilizing cloud providers for this, and these can be automatically connected.

A large number of (passive) viewers can be reached by connecting streaming platforms such as NC3 or Youtube. This is planned for an upcoming release.

OpenTalk utilizes modern container technology. Each conference will be launched within a container. For small-scale installations, that's usually "localhost", or alternatively, a Kubernetes cluster for anything bigger. OpenTalk takes care of the provisioning, operation and shutdown of each conference container.

Containerization ensures vertical & horizontal scaling as wells as clear data separation between conferences and participants. OpenTalk allows hassle-free operation, good management of CPUs and other resources, and avoids the "10K" scale-out issues that other solutions may suffer from. A conference container runs largely independently, which is great for administrators, as configuration changes and even system updates can be performed at all times without causing disruption.

OpenTalk supports the operation of conferences in a cluster of federated conference servers, which enables the creation of security zones. A new conference can be bound to a specific conference server, which hosts the meeting. Participants need to access this specific server to attend the meeting. This way, some conferences can be accessed only from pre-defined locations, such as the computers of your in-house network. Thus, any security-sensitive content will be protected by an additional level of security.

On the other hand, open conferences with external participants can be held in a way that optimizes traffic, using video bridge servers that are freely accessible over the Internet.

OpenTalk comes with open and well-documented APIs. Clearly specified interfaces enable seamless integration into existing platforms and products. All access to features is subject to strict authentication and authorization.

REST-based APIs are available for provisioning of users and rooms, configuration, metrics, and reporting.

This enables a rich set of use cases beyond pure video conferencing and makes OpenTalk a versatile video communication solution for third-party applications.