Communicates everything.
Reveals nothing.

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.

OpenTalk supports multi-moderator meetings. Conferences, workshops, and plenary debates can be conducted more effectively if the effort of moderating these sessions is shared among several privileged moderators. For example, this would resemble the tasks carried out by a council of elders in parliament, or the main board members in a general assembly meeting.

An event console, which is visible to the moderator team, helps coordinate all pending tasks and messages. There is also a separate chat window for exclusive use by the moderation team.

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.

Whether anonymously or not, as a quick way of gauging the mood in the room, or audit-proof for real commitment and impact: OpenTalk is ideal for data protection-compliant, secure decision-making. When it counts, for example at association, advisory board or political meetings.

Participants cannot vote more than once, and results cannot be manipulated by moderators. Even when voting anonymously, participants can use their "voting tokens" to double-check that their vote was counted correctly.

Every conference benefits from good time management. If conferences are time-limited, the remaining time can be emphasized with a color, and displayed in addition to the regular time (Like a "scrum clock"). Participants can be assigned a speaking time to avoid individual speakers to overrun their allocated timeslot - this also works with auto moderation and  talking stick activities.

There is a debating technique where the person who holds the "talking stick" is the only one allowed to speak, until they pass it on to the next person. They can express their thoughts properly, and there is no risk of interruption while they have the talking stick. When finished, they nominate the next speaker by passing on the stick.

With this feature, even difficult or emotional debates with many participants can be conducted in a calm, structured, and constructive manner. It also promotes inclusiveness, as those who may find it more difficult than others to speak up are encouraged to offer their contribution.

In addition to the common "Raise hand" gesture, OpenTalk supports many more features, such as choosing from different levels of urgency, which can be used to raise a point of order, or request topics to be added to the agenda, for example.

OpenTalk comes with speaker lists built in, so that moderators can manage individual speaker contributions as intended and give everyone the speaking time they are entitled to.

In virtual instruction, teachers can measure the engagement level in their classroom by inspecting and reordering the participant list to see the total speaking time for each participant, for example.

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 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.

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.

A completely new architecture was developed for OpenTalk that reflects the current state of security, authentication, encryption, scalability and flexibility - in other words, a state-of-the-art architecture from the 2020s decade.

Security experts appreciate the Rust programming language used for OpenTalk, which is considered to be particularly secure: It is secure and suitable for processing many parallel tasks, as required for video conferences with very large numbers of participants.

OpenTalk is the first provider to receive the "Video conferencing services" IT security mark from the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI). The BSI has thus confirmed that OpenTalk is committed to meeting the security requirements of the new DIN SPEC 27008.

OpenTalk uses the maximum level of encryption provided by the client. OpenTak is working hard to implement true, scalable end-to-end encryption and BSI certification to Common Criteria EAL 4, the highest level of certification for software-only products. So you can talk openly without worrying about confidentiality.

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.