Foreword

We came a long way since we started the public beta testing of Dubjoy, the video voice-over solution in the browser.

We’re targeting a pretty specific public: Language Service Providers, voice actors, voice talents, translators and interpreters. This is mostly a non-technical blend, that like most people, can’t help you efficiently debug, reproduce or describe problems as they occur.

We came a long way since then, with most of the problems being solved and the software approaching production quality fast.

But still, we were desperate for a way to better assist our customers, preferably in real-time.

There are many moving parts to a voice recording app in the browser. And moving parts always make for a fun array of problems customers encounter.

We have to be able to assist people while learning how to use the software for the first time. There can be workflow issues, microphone sensitivity and permission problems, Flash versions, etc.

Communication with your customers is key, and I can’t describe how overwhelmingly positive the reactions have been.

They love to see that you have their back at all times.

Required capabilities

So our ideal system would have the following capabilities:

real-time feedback and help,

log forwarding,

error forwarding,

diagnostic checks,

recovery routines,

reset routines,

system information.

And we set out to find something out there that could help.

Olark

If you’re selling anything on the web and don’t use Olark you’re missing out.

They’re making a chat widget, that you integrate into your site. Once installed your website visitors appear as chat contacts in your IM program like Google Talk.

You can click on anyone and start talking them up, or wait that someone need help and clicks the “Chat with us” button.

So this tool by itself eliminates our first capability requirement: real-time feedback and help.

But as we delved deeper into their developer API documentation we discovered that you can easily extend the functionality of the chat widget by creating your own custom commands and binding to certain events, like when the conversation begins.

Anatomy of our Olark integration

Olark has a nice feature that chat operators can issue commands.

A command is simply any word prefixed with an exclamation, like !debugon.

The “brain” of the integration is a simple parser, that hooks up to the api.chat.onCommandFromOperator event.

A simple example of this, an implementation of the !explainer command:

olark 'api.chat.onCommandFromOperator', (event) -> # !explainer # Show the popup with the explainer video. if event.command.name is 'explainer' V.olark.send