Zoom and Teams always frustrate me, even though they're what I use far more often.
It's too bad that video conferencing is largely a game of who has the most boxes checked - IT admins and A/V folk are the ones that need to be convinced, and Meet just doesn't ...meet... their needs
1. change Meets call layout to one video (presentation) only, disabling participant watching
2. press F11 to make browser go full screen
3. press Ctrl+Minus multiple times to decrease UI elements which makes the shared video near full screen
Zoom also transmits much higher quality video and screen share feeds than meet does.
This new feature is very impressive although, most echo cancellation is "mute everyone except one speaker" which leads to walkie-talkie style half-duplex talking, which really hurts normal communication flows. I wonder how they do it here.
Getting logged in is always a problem. Setting my name permanently is literally always a problem (I have zero idea why). Viewing someone elses screen always stinks because the scaling is just not good.
On top of that you can't compare Teams to Google Meet because literally every organization has theirs configured differently. For some organizations, I can use my phone for audio. For others I can only use my laptop. So it's never an Apples to Apples comparison. Sometimes you have access to chat history; other times if you reconnect you lose chat history. The differences inside a product go on and on.
usually there is need to some third party extension/application that have usually does not support Linux
or if Linux is supported, they explicitly ban Wayland/pipewire (I'm looking at you slack)
but for need they stick to web standards therefore this works in any web browser you might have
also it tends to not consume every CPU cycle you have (slack again) so you can do so something while you eg screen sharing
Note sure if that’s because I’m not in the US.
In my experience Zoom is always slightly better, but at a nitpicking level. I use meet day in day out, and fallback to whatever we have in hand if it's unworkable (pixelation would hit that line), and never saw zoom or Skype or discord being significantly better at these times.
Such a nightmare. Quality of meetings went downhill and employees were penalised for secretly using Meet for ad hoc meetings.
Also I swear the audio latency is worse with Zoom -- I find myself accidentally interrupting people more often.
Why would someone ever be secretly punished?
As it is, we're gradually shifting more things to Zoom where that's either part basic functionality, or part easy to automate as things like Zapier are well integrated into the API.
We only use Meet for team meetings now, and we did use Gong.io to solve the above... but Gong is pretty expensive just to allow those who were out that week to catch up on a recording when they're back and if they care to.
I wouldn’t want “autorecord” though - it’s better for culture and rapport to not feel like every conversation is “on the record.”
Autosharing can be easily solved by simple Google Apps Script. I scan my personal calendar and share recording to Slack channel when I detect group meeting with recording available. Mail me, so I can arrange something for you.
Autorecording - yeah, this is missing. There is paid Chrome Extension which do that, but I have never tested it.
Not quite sure about this. Gmail (both personal and company accounts) is IMO a great email client with loads of handy features, and I always felt Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/Drawings were well put together. Are they the best in class? I guess it depends what you are looking for. Could Drive be faster? Yes, that would be nice. But "amateur hour" sounds like we are simply using different products.
Regarding support, that is not an issue I have never needed it for Google, but occasionally have needed for MS Office. So I can see why if you are using Office you would value that.
At least personally I refuse to make a Google account bc it requires giving Google my phone number... But I know that's a bit of technoludditism in the current zeitgeist
Perhaps it's meeting specific, or organization specific?
https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9303069?hl=en&co=GENI...
Unfortunately, it's only a matter of time until one their VPs decides to "improve it" with the usual imbecile ideas they come up with.
>Google Meet now scans all your files so they can get shared automatically with all members on the meeting when it is appropriate to enrich the conversation. You cannot opt-out this feature.
My daughter’s school uses Zoom for her IEP where at least one attendee is remote that day. Not a fun experience.
Outputting audio from multiple laptops in the same room is easy. Perfectly syncing it is harder. Implementing echo cancellation across all of that is quite a bit trickier than regular single-device echo cancellation.
But then treating all the laptop microphones as a kind of microphone array, having to deal with sync issues and phase issues and background noise issues... that's hard core.
Kudos to the engineering team on this one. This is actually pretty amazing.
This essentially replaces that expensive proprietary hardware with a matrix of laptops, and essentially every user gets a mic.
But it only works on laptops right, not phones?
But I don't necessarily know that Meet is trying to tackle all this? Are they using the mics as a microphone array & processing signals across phases? Could be missing it but I don't see that they said so. Perhaps they're just picking the loudest mic for a given speaker? Or any of a dozen other simpler tactics?
That's not to diminish the accomplishment or say that it's easy (or that I could do it), but I don't think a neural network is necessary here.
And yet Google can ship it anywhere on the planet via HTTPS and webasm... Things that make you go hmm.
Too many times these kinds of services are wrapped up at the application layer, where really they belong in the operating system. For example, wouldn't this be a perfect thing to implement as a plugin for Pulseaudio, or JACK, or even .. VST?
(Disclaimer: I work on high end microphone and audio products at a well-known hardware manufacturer of such, where much more effort is being made to make the devices, themselves, smarter ..)
I worked for a company that was headquartered in London and had satellite offices in Spain and Germany. After we all went remote during the pandemic the EU offices said they felt so much more engaged with the rest of the company because they were no longer disadvantaged by default for not being in HQ and in person bad habits were penalizing them
The meeting room (should) have a much higher quality mic than an attendee's laptop. You want that mic.
Worse, when attendees use their mic, someone in the room asks a question, which remote viewers cannot/do not hear, because it is not picked up by the mic on the laptop. Or they join and don't mute, resulting in feedback loops.
I do feel the need for Google's feature though: the pandemic has meant a reduction in offices, so now we're ending up in "co-working" spaces, which — despite this being the bread and butter of the business — have in my experience alarmingly poor quality meeting rooms. To the extent that those present have given up on them. Literally, we were in one with no cabling. We asked the company for a cable, and they gave us a DP cable, but the room was HDMI. In these situations, yeah, nobody is going to want to waste the time trying to deal with getting the coworking space provider to deliver a quality product, and features like the one here help make up the difference.
What you're running into is almost certainly noise cancelling. It's turning off your incoming audio so it doesn't intrude on your microphone picking up your voice.
Disabling or tweaking noise cancelling or audio modes (i.e. to "headset") on basically every meeting software will eventually get you a combination that doesn't do this. It's sometimes a bit hidden though, and many have chosen to just say "everyone gets maximum noise cancelling" rather than trying to guess based on your audio device(s) so it doesn't always do it automatically or obviously.
Not triplex or quadruplex etc.
In other words, if you're having a 1-1 video call, both of you have your audio working at all times.
But as you go to 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 participants, it generally continues to be just max 2 simultaneous audio streams, determined by whoever has been the loudest recently.
Unless you turn on special features like music mode etc.
This is a feature, not a bug, because otherwise background noise and sounds would start adding up to become intolerable. (Why we usually try to intentionally stay on mute anyways, so we don't accidentally become even just that second audio stream.)
I was talking to someone who specialises in corporate communication at a conference last week and she confirmed my feeling above as well. Her thing is “talking over each other is a key part of human interaction and forcing one at a time is stifling and unnatural”
I'm disapponted when people send me Zoom meetings or want to meet on Slack. Google Meet is a 10x better experience.
Or mid-prod outage trying to get some engineer to type a command to run for you, and they can't dictate from speech to terminal, because they don't know shell/Unix commands at all. Then I can just write the command on their screen, for them to copy character by character… (to some extent, chat solves this. To some extent. I also wish we could get some basic markdown.)
I know that it's possible to use Zoom and Teams anonymously. But for Google Meet, I assume providing a (verified) phone number is required.
As far as Teams vs. Meet, it seems like Teams is great when you are working with people that have climbed it's learning curve. Teams is also filled with UX paths where it takes one or two extra clicks (and thoughts) to do simple things like share a file.
Can you give one example?
1) You can call someone in Teams. Sure, Google Chat has "Start Meeting now" but it's very passive. I know some will see this as negative but ringing has massive advantages around UX.
2) Chat, Teams will persist chat after meeting ends. In fact, depending on how you hold the meeting, it might dump the contents into chat channel so it's preserved in more open manner.
3) You can have visible meetings. You can start a meeting in a Teams chat channel so everyone can see the meeting is going on. It creates that in the office feeling of two people working on a whiteboard nearby that if topic interests you, you can join in.
4) Sharing Documents, Add Word Document to meeting, everyone is granted permissions. Done.
The fact so many Google Workspaces companies have Slack is just frustrating. You have these two products that barely talk.
True, but Teams is so buggy and had in many areas has no UX per se.
I'd take for 2 great products (Slack + Meet) with bad integration vs great integration of shitty products.
They do not integrate at all on these topics. Slack really could expand here (outside of huddles).
Auto-detect people not using headphones, and prevent them from speaking. Until they put some one.
Ideally showing them some customisable scolding message.
So far, any feedback / echo cancellation I've encountered just makes everybody's life miserable. Degradation to non-duplex voice (because all except the loudest speaker are attenuated down), "seaside noise" effect", etc.
This is the reason why a phone call over GSM or landline still often "feels" better than any HD video call with people on screens: Low-latency duplex audio.
Most* of this goes away if you just wear headphones.
Maybe this can be fixed by making the algorithm way more complicated, as the announced feature does. But I'd be surprised.
[*]: "Most": 2 people with headphones sitting near each other still cause echoes for each other and other participants. Fixing that is truly novel, and needed even for headphone users.
I was shocked to learn that the latency from laptop to ear is higher than to the other side of the planet.
Most people don't notice the adverse psychological aspects of this:
People get really annoyed by when constantly talking over each other. It subconciously makes you dread talking to the other person.
When everybody is using wired headphones, you suddenly like your coworkers more!
We should probably get off hacker news and just start building a teleconferencing app.
This is the part where I mention how Bose, despite making a $300 headset, didn't put a pin/wire on the wired connection for the mic.
(I usually use the laptop mic nonetheless, though, because for some reason if you want to record audio with bluetooth, the quality of the audio output becomes potato.)
I love my WFH setup with a dynamic right in front of my mouth and have the system properly rung out so I can monitor myself with no feedback. The cartoid pattern greatly reduces the sound coming from the off-axis speakers and the noise gate takes care of the rest. Obviously this isn't for everyone though and good luck having something this in the office unless you have a room with a door.
Though I guess in a hybrid meeting they'd make it harder to hear the people in the room. (But you'd hear them through the laptop, normally? I guess there would be an uncanny delay...)
Cool, so now I can get high fidelity audio of the guy in the corner surreptitiously trying to eat a bag of chips on Google Meet now too?
> Available for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on.
> and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on
This might actually be using a decent amount of data center processing to handle the merged audio performantly.
If that's the case, it could make sense that it belongs to a higher tier.
also, in a previous iteration of google's AI branding, meet had a feature that would create llm-generated meeting notes for you. i'm unsure if this still exists
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/29/23849056/google-meet-ai-d...
I hate that I have to always manually tweak it through dev tools to make it usable.
How many 400k TC engineers and misguided product managers does it take to make that change? FFS
In products like Meet, JavaScript just acts as a glue language that sticks all these APIs together. All the heavy lifting is actually done by the browser, and modern browsers are some of the most efficient language runtimes humanity has ever built.
We use Meet a lot, and I'd never noticed that happening before and wondered if it was due to some setting.
In Discord, you can actually view your audio in reference to the threshold, which helps get that setting set appropriately for the hardware you have. No such luck for the "real" VC apps though.
I don't trust Google with barely anything these days anymore (except Gmail just because it has been so long, and Maps), but Google Meet is the one thing that I prefer Google's solution over anyone else's.
Meet is just so much better than Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, WhatsApp Video, etc.
I'm so glad they are tackling this specific issue. Pretty amazing feat if it works well.
So much better? Does Meet have instruments for whiteboarding or on-screen annotation?
Now fixing search, that would be truly mind blowing.
super cool tech, but was hard to convince my org to use it over Zoom/Meet
Meet has had echo cancellation from the start.
This is multi-device adaptive audio merging, as the title says. Completely different, and far far more impressive.
Better to use Meet than Zoom if the Chinese are in your threat profile or a larger threat.
The functionality here seems interesting, but I assume only works well if everyone or almost everyone brings a laptop. It probably won't work well for those situations where only one or two people take their laptops to an in-person meeting.
So basically unaffordable for most organisations.
What does this mean?
I however think (emulated) stereo sound and low latency would do wonders. Sadly this feature here will only introduce latency.
Feedback cancellation for external speakers would also be amazing, so you can get rid of your headphones at home. Close up mic and noise gate works, but is fiddly (and no easy noise gate and compressor on linux...)
I remember using that tool in 2022 or so, multiple people in a room with this kind of audio sync / cancellation.
because that sounds amazing
