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Yup. The worst on Zoom and Google Meet is: a. the person with feedback or background noise causing the video to flip to them b. someone displaying their lunch

by ben509 6y ago

Yup. The worst on Zoom and Google Meet is: a. the person with feedback or background noise causing the video to flip to them b. someone displaying their lunch for everyone to see c. Zoom specialty: obnoxious video backgrounds Zoom helps you block trolls, but does nothing for the pain of having to listen to someone's feedback during an hour long meeting. And you often don't want to interrupt the meeting to pester people about their microphone. It's a similar problem to Slack. We have some people who overuse @here and various similar sins, and Slack's answer is there's no reason to block, just fix your company.[1] What this misses is there's a broad range of behavior between pleasant and malicious. There are also a broad range of social remedies we normally use to deal with this behavior. Most of those social remedies don't work well online. It's surprisingly hard to craft a written correction that doesn't come across as an attack, especially if you're senior and don't want to unintentionally throw that rank around. [1]: https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481 https://twitter.com/stewart/status/624239660529684481

soylentcola 6y ago
We also use WebEx at work (university setting) and for smaller meetings, we require everyone to use (at a minimum) a set of basic headphones to avoid echo. If they don't use them, they need to keep their mic muted whenever they aren't speaking. For class-related stuff or larger meetings/seminars, we use the Events portion of WebEx instead of Meetings. It's basically the same thing, but there are more "roles" so there's a host who can mute/unmute participants or assign privileges. Panelists are the speakers who can turn their audio and video off by themselves but can only screen share if made a "presenter". Attendees are just the people watching the thing, and they can chat with text but can't turn their own mics on. They can raise their hand or the host can find them in the attendee list if they need to unmute them. Once people got used to how it works, it has been surprisingly effective. You don't need to make sure every attendee in a 300-person seminar has headphones on--just the people who are presenting. If one of the presenters is unwilling or unable to use headphones, I can mute them if they have a live mic that's just causing echo while they sit there and listen. Students and other attendees can still speak with their mics, but only when called on. Incidentally, this also does away with all of the issues of people disrupting Zoom calls because you can only join as a panelist if you are on the list and have the right link. You can still publish the attendee link publicly because the worst thing an attendee can do is type in the chat (and even then, they can only send to "all participants" if you enable it).
marcusjt 6y ago
I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned that Meet is rolling out a pretty impressive AI-powered nose reduction feature to solve the background noise problem - see https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21285011/google-meet-background-noise-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21285011/google-meet-backg... (watch the video)

by ben509 6y ago

soylentcola 6y ago

We also use WebEx at work (university setting) and for smaller meetings, we require everyone to use (at a minimum) a set of basic headphones to avoid echo. If they don't use them, they need to keep their mic muted whenever they aren't speaking. For class-related stuff or larger meetings/seminars, we use the Events portion of WebEx instead of Meetings. It's basically the same thing, but there are more "roles" so there's a host who can mute/unmute participants or assign privileges. Panelists are the speakers who can turn their audio and video off by themselves but can only screen share if made a "presenter". Attendees are just the people watching the thing, and they can chat with text but can't turn their own mics on. They can raise their hand or the host can find them in the attendee list if they need to unmute them. Once people got used to how it works, it has been surprisingly effective. You don't need to make sure every attendee in a 300-person seminar has headphones on--just the people who are presenting. If one of the presenters is unwilling or unable to use headphones, I can mute them if they have a live mic that's just causing echo while they sit there and listen. Students and other attendees can still speak with their mics, but only when called on. Incidentally, this also does away with all of the issues of people disrupting Zoom calls because you can only join as a panelist if you are on the list and have the right link. You can still publish the attendee link publicly because the worst thing an attendee can do is type in the chat (and even then, they can only send to "all participants" if you enable it).

marcusjt 6y ago

I'm surprised nobody has yet mentioned that Meet is rolling out a pretty impressive AI-powered nose reduction feature to solve the background noise problem - see https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21285011/google-meet-background-noise-artificial-intelligence-machine-learning https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/9/21285011/google-meet-backg... (watch the video)