What Talkline is

Talkline is a calling platform for products that already have users. It connects people in audio and video calls — one-to-one, in groups, or through a queue to whichever agent is free — and it does not know who those people are. Your product does.

You integrate it in three places:

Where	What you use	What it does
Your backend	The control API, or @talkline/server-sdk in Node	Mints access tokens for your users, creates rooms and queues, places calls from the server, reads history and usage
Your clients	@talkline/core, and @talkline/react for React apps	Connects to Talkline's signaling server, places and answers calls, joins rooms, carries the media, recovers from network trouble
Your webhook endpoint	Webhooks	Tells your backend what happened: a call answered, a call ended and how long it was billed, a queue call assigned

What you keep, and what Talkline owns

The line between the two is the point of the platform, so here it is precisely.

Concern	Owner
Signaling, connection setup, rooms, reconnection, ringing and ring timeouts	Talkline
Choosing an agent for a queue call	Talkline queues, configured by you
Presence and availability	Talkline presence, plus the availability each identity chooses
Call history and quality	Talkline keeps it; you mirror what you need from webhooks
Usage metering, and optional prepaid credit enforcement	Talkline
Money, prices, entitlements, business workflow	You — never a call fact
Persistent chat	You; Talkline carries in-call data messages only
Every word a user sees	You — the SDKs ship no user-facing text in any language
Who a person is	You; Talkline sees an opaque identity string

There is no user login anywhere in Talkline. It has no idea who your users are, stores no passwords, and never issues a user a session. Your backend already knows who its user is; all it needs from Talkline is a way to say so, and that is an access token.

How a call happens

1. A user opens your app. Your client asks your backend for an access token; your backend checks its own session, decides which identity and permissions the user gets, and signs a token with your API secret.
2. Your client gives that token to TalklineClient, which connects to Talkline's signaling server.
3. The client places a call to another identity — agent:7 — or joins a room by name.
4. Talkline rings every connected tab and device of that identity. One answers; the others stop ringing.
5. The two clients exchange media, directly when they can, through a relay when they cannot. In a group room, through Talkline's media server.
6. When the call ends, Talkline sends your webhook endpoint call.ended with its duration and billable seconds.

Everything in between — a network change, a laptop waking from sleep, a server node failing — is the SDK's and the platform's to recover from, and your UI is told what state the connection is in.

Where to go next

• Onboarding — the steps to adopt Talkline, and how to verify each one.
• Concepts — identities, rooms, calls and grants, in a page.
• A one-to-one call — the shortest path to two people talking.