Understanding telephony and VoIP audio

You should carefully consider your audio options and how you'll use audio during your session. Most webinars require the presenter to have audio so that they can broadcast to users. But ask yourself, do your participants also need to be able to speak during the session? In an earlier movie we saw that I created a session room and set the audio option to use WebEx audio, which allows my participants one of two options.

They can choose telephone audio or Voice over IP audio, which is computer-based audio. When they join a session this window will pop up, prompting them to select their preferred audio option. To use the computer option, they'll need to have a microphone and speaker or headset plugged into their computer. This is not the telephone option. When they click on Call Using Computer they will connect to the audio and then they'll be able to speak to you through their headset microphone or standalone microphone.

A display shows them how strong their audio volume is and they can make changes to the audio volume by dragging the scroll bar to the right. At any time they can leave the audio conference by clicking this red button. If participants choose to access the audio using a telephone, they'll expand this portion of the screen and they can ask WebEx to call them back at their own telephone number or they can use the dial-in number provided on the session information page.

If they fill in their own phone number, they would then click on Call me. If they choose I will call in, the information that they will need to use to dial-in will be displayed for them. A telephone number is displayed here in addition to a link to global call-in numbers. So if some of your participants are joining from outside the US or Canada, they'll see a telephone number that will give them local access. Each participant will enter the access code followed by the pound sign.

And it's important that each attendee also fill in their attendee ID with pound sign so that their phone number and their name in the participant list become associated with each other. If they fail to do that you may see two instances of that person which will represent their computer login and their PC login. Once they make a decision and decide to call-in, they will connect to the session and this dialog box will close.

Once the participant has connected to the audio, an icon will display to the left of their name. If they've joined on PC audio or voice over IP audio, you'll see a headset icon displayed to the left of their name. If they are joining on a telephone, you'll see a tiny icon of a telephone displayed. When you're speaking you'll see green lines emanating from that icon. And to mute your own audio, you can use the button on the far right side to the right of your own name to mute your audio.

When muted, your audio button displays as red. There are some other considerations related to audio and that is, will you need to record your session? If you choose to record a session, be sure to use either Voice over IP audio or WebEx integrated telephony or both. If you choose to use an external conference calling system, a third-party system, you'll need to set up that third-party conference call to properly integrate with WebEx.

If you're recording to the network, the conference calling service will be automatically integrated. But if you're recording to your local drive, WebEx does not recognize the third-party conference calling system. You would need to use a standalone hardware device that plugs into your PC on one end and your telephone on the other end. There are products available including the DynaMetric product and That devices that are the hardware that plug your PC into your telephone.

That way when you make your recording, the audio will be captured from your telephone and integrated in with your PC. If you fail to make that connection, you might record your WebEx session and find out later that the audio was not also included. So your audio considerations are important and should be done well in advance of your session before you actually create the session itself. The easiest option is to use the WebEx integrated telephony and Voice over IP and allow your participants to choose which one is more appropriate.

Keep in mind, if you're providing a toll-free number for users, that can incur a large cost to you. If you prefer to allow participants to use Voice over IP, it's important that they have access to speakers and microphones or headsets. Be sure your participants know what the audio options will be so that they can make arrangements and prepare to login and choose the appropriate audio.