NEW: Active Speaker Highlighting, Help Widget, and More Updates

DATE: December 20, 2021

AUTHOR: Dave Schools

Woohoo! Session now has release notes! Christmas came early!

We're excited to use this changelog as a space to "show and tell" you all about the new features and updates that are now available in Session.

A couple important notes on how to use this changelog:

Be sure to subscribe to updates in the top right corner to get notified of new updates as soon as they're available.
We want your feedback! We'd love to hear what you think about what we're building. Use the button to the left or the help widget to share your feedback.

Okay, on to the updates.

We're excited to slip in a few updates before the holiday break. Here's what's now available in your Session account.

Highlighting active speakers is here

Remember when you couldn't tell who was speaking in Session, especially when there were a lot of people in the room?

Well, not anymore.

When someone speaks now, you'll see their name light up in blue and an audio visualization animates.

It looks like this:

You can now see a question mark button in the bottom right corner of your window in Session. If you click that you see three options:

What's new -- displays the latest release updates from our changelog.
Contact support -- links to our knowledge base for now, but will soon be staff with 24/7 live human support!
Submit feedback -- remember the magenta feedback button? This is it! Select this to report bugs, issues, or feedback of any kind.

We listen to your feedback! In addition to countless bug squashes, we fixed up some of the most reported issues this release:

Playing YouTube videos is a lot easier now. YouTube volume and mute state are synced across all participants. Users that didn't start the video cannot pause the video.
Also, the AMA theme now limits presenting to a maximum of four people, making it easier to switch between themes.
Light design refresh — the home screen, buttons, side panel, room settings, and more received a visual update giving the UI of Session a clean, more polished feel. For example, a few pages, like your profile settings, are now modals instead of separate pages.

🙌 Reminder for feedback before you go! Just a quick sentence would be great. Click the button on the left.

See you next time!