Why we use WebRTC for our voice products

This post was originally published in Oct. 2014. It has been updated for accuracy.

Brian Peterson is VP of Product Engineering and co-founder at Dialpad, specializing in web development, cloud services and databases. Before Dialpad, Brian was at Google for eight years, where he spent most of his time working on the Google Voice team and leading the transition of GrandCentral’s technology onto Google’s infrastructure.

We built both Dialpad Ai Meetings (formerly known as UberConference) and Dialpad on Google Cloud Platform using WebRTC. Our goal from the beginning was to bring innovation to some of the obvious problems with conference calls and phone systems, making them relevant and useful again. We wanted to develop our products for the way we work today—faster, more mobile, and across multiple platforms and devices. WebRTC helped us do that.

WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities.

Why is that cool?

It’s cool because it's a way to get very high-quality, secure VoIP to your browser (for free), without having to install any extra plug-in.

WebRTC uses the Opus Codec, which offers the best audio experience out there. Not only does it give your Dialpad calls HD audio, but it also handles dynamic network conditions by adjusting to the available bandwidth wherever you are.

Dialpad Meetings was one of the earliest WebRTC adopters, launching at Google I/O in 2013—just one week after Google released it. With WebRTC implemented, our users can connect to their calls in real-time without having to leave their browsers and even make international calls through the browser at no cost.

For similar reasons, Dialpad uses WebRTC for voice communication through your desktop. It’s available without any extra software across Windows, Mac, Chromebook, and even Linux, and because of its cross-platform capabilities, WebRTC allowed us to deploy the Dialpad native app instantaneously across all platforms, instead of having to build separately for each one. It allows for a more streamlined experience for developers, but also lets us roll out the app faster for users on any platform.

Because Dialpad is a Chrome web app, WebRTC is already built in and users only need to have Chrome to use it. Just like with Dialpad Meetings, it gives Dialpad users HD audio and lets them call internationally for free when making and answering calls from the desktop.

WebRTC is game changing, and it’s paving the way for whole new types of web applications like Dialpad and Dialpad Meetings. We do our best to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to advancing the quality and accessibility of our products, and as the WebRTC standard becomes available in more browsers, we plan to build accordingly.