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Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging
- bagels 2y agoI'm more interested in cancelling regular feedback from one laptop in the meeting.
- e_carra 2y agoNot sure if this would solve your problem, but have you tried companion mode?
- bagels 2y agoI think the other party would need to try it? I'm using a headset, the feedback is coming from the other party.
- benhurmarcel 2y agoThe problem is the other half of the company that never use it.
- parpfish 2y agoDo you mean audio feedback, or just one user that complains a lot?
- bagels 2y agoI'm talking about when I hear my own voice. It happens when the person I am talking to is using speakers and a microphone, and my voice is picked up by their speakers and transmitted back to me. I didn't know this was controversial.
- crazygringo 2y agoFYI, that's echo, not feedback. It can happen on any service and it means the echo cancellation on their end got confused -- it's an adaptive algorithm but occasionally adapts wrong. Best way to fix it is to mute yourself for ~5 seconds and then unmute, which should reset their echo cancellation algorithm. If that doesn't fix it, then have both of you pause and not talk for ~5 seconds. This should absolutely reset it, as the echo cancellation algorithm has now definitively learned what silence is supposed to sound like.
- foreigner 2y agoDo any of the video call services support full duplex audio? It feels so stifling to have to be perfectly silent while others are speaking, compared to the give and take of a normal conversation.
- stavros 2y agoYes, all of them. Wear headphones.
- Groxx 2y agoTo +1 this, yes, every single one AFAIK. 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.
- stavros 2y agoMinor correction: it's echo cancelation, not noise canceling.
- leghifla 2y ago+1 And usually, the one person in the meeting not using headphones does not feel the problem: he can speak all the time and be heard correctly, while the others cannot interrupt him while he is speaking
- stavros 2y agoIt's the other way around, the person who has no headphones cannot be heard while anyone else speaks.
- simonbarker87 2y ago
- nevir 2y agoMeet, to me, is the perfect balance of functionality and simplicity (as an end user). And features like this only make that more apparent. 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
- stavros 2y agoMeet frustrates me immensely because I can't just fullscreen someone sharing an HD screen onto my HD screen and get 1:1 pixels with an overlay of faces (like Zoom does). Instead, I have to either not be able to read small text, or awkwardly pan in the recently-added "zoom" view.
- CitrusFruits 2y agoYeah I feel like with a couple UI tweaks or options Meet would be the best by far. It's just so much more convenient and accessible than the others.
- stavros 2y agoI definitely agree, needs no installation, things just work, quality is good, has nice features like push-to-talk, etc. It's great, there are just some tiny UX niggles that could be solved very easily but haven't been, yet.
- matsemann 2y agoIt's horrible slow on some computers/browser combos, which is my main gripe with it. Video quality is also much worse, but doesn't matter too much to me. And as with all Google stuff the UX is kinda weird and non-intuitive. What does all the different join options do? When should I use what? Why must all presentations be so small if I also want to see the presenter? Zoom is much better here.
- echelon 2y agoMeet and Google Docs are perfect Google products. I'm disapponted when people send me Zoom meetings or want to meet on Slack. Google Meet is a 10x better experience.
- lawik 2y agoUnless you need legible screen dharing of a code editor in my experience. Zoom is awful in many ways but blows Meet out of the water for our needs.
- aniviacat 2y agoIs it possible to use Google Meet without telling Google your phone number? 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.
- rav 2y agoYou can use it with just a personal Google account - does that require a phone number? Alternatively, someone with a Google account can create a meeting (https://meet.new https://meet.new) and send you the link, which you can join without any Google account at all.
- worthless-trash 2y agoI have never given my work my number, and yet meet seems to work for all my work meetings.
- parpfish 2y agoI love meet because of how well it’s integrated with google cal
- gomox 2y agoThere's a Zoom plugin for GCal that makes Zoom's integration identical to Meet, including mobile app integration.
- pcx 2y agoKudos to Meet team for supporting this! In the video conf world, where most problems are well solved, this is such an amazing feature to differentiate and be customer first!
- madisp 2y agoSadly this is feature-gated behind Gemini :/ > Available for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on.
- trustno2 2y agoI'm not that deep into Google latest rebrand activity... how is Google Meet related to LLM model? or do they call many unrelated things Gemini?
- smt88 2y agoIt's not related to Gemini. I suspect they're putting non-LLM stuff behind the Gemini paywall to make Gemini look more profitable than it is. Like most LLM rollouts, it could maybe become cashflow-positive, but it will likely never be profitable because of the many billions it takes to compete with OpenAI and Meta.
- benterix 2y ago> It's not related to Gemini. I suspect they're putting non-LLM stuff behind the Gemini paywall to make Gemini look more profitable than it is. I have yet to decide whether this is more ridiculous or sad.
- adrianmonk 2y agoBundling could also be a strategy to get people to try LLM products. You want X, you have to buy a package with both X and Y to get X. Many people will think, "I'm paying for Y, might as well try getting something out of it."
- notatoad 2y agogoogle meet is part of their office suite, called google workspace. the higher tiers of google workspace include access to the paid tier of gemeni. 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-duet-attend-for-me https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/29/23849056/google-meet-ai-d...
- pawelwentpawel 2y agoDo other platforms already provide something similar? While I've been picking up calls mostly in meeting / silent rooms (times of gathering around a jabra like a camping bonfire are fortunately gone for now) - some of the users of a platform that I've built (https://flat.social https://flat.social) would occasionally experience the atrocious feedback whistle while being in physical proximity.
- pachico 2y agoAm I the only one surprised that they keep using this blog style as it was 2005?
- sexy_seedbox 2y agoBlogger is basically abandonware.
- indymike 2y agoI just exited my startup and now work for a much bigger company. I'm going from a Google-based productivity stack to a Microsoft one, and so far Teams is the worst and best change. Google Meet was fantastic for "just working" especially for less sophisticated meeting guests. The only time Meet didn't work is when corporate IT departments at customers actively blocked Meet so their minions used the "approved meeting solution". 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.
- benterix 2y ago> 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. Can you give one example?
- stackskipton 2y agoI can give several. Most of them are not Meet specific but how Meets integrates with rest of Google Products. This is actually overall massive problem with Google Workspaces in general IMO. 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.
- risyachka 2y ago> The fact so many Google Workspaces companies have Slack is just frustrating 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.
- rav 2y agoMeet is nice and nicer than Teams and Zoom in my opinion, but for 1-on-1 pair programming I think Facebook Messenger actually has the best experience - when you're on the same screen resolution, the screen sharing is 100% zoom (unlike Meet which has padding around the edges), and you can move seamlessly between mobile and desktop (i.e. answer a video call on mobile, the other party sets up screen sharing, and you go to a laptop to continue the call). Too bad I'm not automatically Facebook friends with all my co-workers!
- Kwpolska 2y agoYou can convince your company to switch to Workplace, a corporate version of Facebook.
- sophiebits 2y agoBad news… https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156712/meta-workplace-facebook-work-shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156712/meta-workplace-f...
- pachico 2y agoGitLab offers a nice course about transitioning to remote work. One of the items in their guidelines about online meeting is not having hybrid meetings. This is, all those attending must attend from their own device rather than the meeting room one (see Jabra) precisely for the reasons this feature tries to address.
- benterix 2y agoRules are meant to be broken. I've participated in many meetings where, for one reason or another, some participants couldn't join in person. Making it easier - for them and for us - is a technical challenge, and not something to be decided by an arbitrary rule.
- djtango 2y agoRemote is extreme and is still not the norm. It is easier to baseline on things optimised for remote then relax than try to shoehorn in person into remote which is then doomed to fail. 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
- unixhero 2y agoIt was for 2.5-3 entire years
- The_Colonel 2y agoPersonally, it was an eye-opener for me to see what difference the personal contact makes. I now prefer companies which are in-person or hybrid (which doesn't optimize for remote).
- pquki4 2y ago"doomed to fail" Its definitely doomed to fail if CEOs want you to think it's doomed. Your comment is handwavy with words like "feel" and "bad habits". There are real issues with remote work, but there are also ways to mitigate the downsides of it. It's easier for some people to just dismiss the idea entirely and pretend that in-office work is the better alternative without any problems. I have definitely seen that happen in my company and here.
- moomoo11 2y agoMeet is nice, but could the screen sharing view just please take 100% height/width? 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
- kccqzy 2y agoIt takes just one misguided product manager. It's easy at Google for one misguided product manager to derail a dozen engineers' work.
- DrammBA 2y agoAre you using firefox? I use this extension called Stylus that lets you write custom css for pages and automatically apply it when you visit the page. There's probably something similar for chromium browsers
- moomoo11 2y agoYeah but why do they make the UX so painful? Its their product, they should make it better for the people who use it every day. WHy make our lives worse lol wtf, its good software so I obviously like using it, and want this small change and I'm sure someone like Google can swing it
- dansimau 2y agoI've always thought it would be nice if microphones can be merged when on a phone call with AirPods in. The mics in those headphones are really far away from my face and when it's windy talking on them is almost impossible. It would be nice to be able to just talk into the mic on my phone. Then the phone could boost my voice from multiple mics and filter out background noise.
- sMarsIntruder 2y agoAvailable for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on. So basically unaffordable for most organisations.
- opdahl 2y agoThis amazing news for my hybrid team. It has always been a struggle figuring out with laptop to use, moving around so you get closer to the mic etc. Hopefully it is as seamless as they portray it here in the blog.
- pquki4 2y agoMy company has conference rooms that have specialized hardware for Microsoft Teams meetings. The audio really sucks -- everyone must project their voice for people joining online to hear. If someone speaks in a low voice, nothing can be heard on Teams even though it is clear enough for people in the room. I don't understand how we haven't solved this problem yet. 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.
- andai 2y agoSounds imprrssive, but also overengineered? Don't headphones solve the same problem? 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...)
- mattlondon 2y agoNo because your voice is not constrained to headphones.
- Groxx 2y agoNo problem, just get everyone a Mutalk. Think of all the savings when you no longer need meeting rooms!
- deathanatos 2y agoThe most impressive thing about that is that the Mutalk 2 exists.
- okdood64 2y agoWho's wearing headphones in a meeting? Good luck trying to get people to do that.
- dewey 2y agoI think you miss-understood the feature. It fixes the issue where there's multiple people in a room joining the same meeting from their laptops while sitting next to each other. It basically combines all microphones / speakers in that room into one big speaker / microphone just like a fancy conference setup.
- akira2501 2y ago> just like a fancy conference setup. 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?
- sharts 2y agoIt took this many years to get echo cancellation implemented? Many other services had this like a decade ago.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 2y agoNo. 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.
- dtx1 2y agoWe use google meet internally where i work but i often have to work with external companies using teams, zoom and whatever else. Google Meet just works, all day, everyday for us (barring a fucked up client audio setup...) and this is such a sweet feature we've struggled with, I genuinely look forward to testing this
- nickpsecurity 2y agoAnother advantage of Meet that it is under U.S. control and law. Zoom out their development team in China. That country actively targets dissidents. It’s easier when those controlling the software are easy for them to control. Better to use Meet than Zoom if the Chinese are in your threat profile or a larger threat.
- crazygringo 2y agoI just want to say that this is really actually kind of mind-blowing from an audio engineering perspective. 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.
- iandanforth 2y agoDo you think they are using some kind of inaudible-to-humans signal to coordinate this or is the unmodified audio good enough?
- vineyardmike 2y agoUnmodified audio is good enough, but using some signaling sound would improve coordination.
- dathery 2y agoI could see this happening. Zoom for example already uses ultrasonic sound to detect what conference room a laptop is in for one-click screen sharing.
- YZF 2y agoI wasn't aware audio hardware on laptops can emit ultrasound. Aren't those filtered to be below 22KHz?
- nomel 2y agoMost adults can’t hear > 18kHz. Related, there are devices you can buy to repel teenagers: https://www.today.com/news/controversial-mosquito-sonic-devices-deter-young-people-high-pitched-sounds-t157801 https://www.today.com/news/controversial-mosquito-sonic-devi...
- krashidov 2y agoThe fact that you can't easily go full screen on Meets is bizarre. Makes it a non-starter for pairing. Also, the dedicated app's session lasts for like a day which makes it useless, so I'm stuck having to scroll through my 3 chrome windows and 40 tabs to see where my meets tab is. Although I'm sure the session timeout is some sort of gsuite configuration
- notatoad 2y agodoes this mean that when a new person joins a meeting that isn't on mute by default, we won't have to deal with the echos from everybody else in the office while they scramble to find the mute button? because that sounds amazing
- anotheryou 2y agoSurround sound from the speakers next :)? 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...)
- nh2 2y agoI want a simpler feature: 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.
- maliker 2y agoAnd then there's another nag prompt if bluetooth headphones/mic are detected. The latency on those things can get horrendous, up to like 300 ms.
- nh2 2y agoExactly! 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!
- deepak_sozial 2y agoWill this work on Google Workspace Business Starter plans?
- 7ewis 2y agoI had the opportunity to try this last month, it worked really well!
- alberth 2y agoIf this works, I really hope it comes to both Teams & Zoom as well.
- ghostpepper 2y agoMaybe the next feature they can work on is allowing multiple people to speak simultaneously
- sirjaz 2y agoBut when will Google roll out a stand alone app for meet on Windows and MacOS? It couldn't be that hard and it would have better performance then running in the browser.
- tedd4u 2y agoDon’t they already have it? It’s called Chrome.
- GeneralMaximus 2y agoWhat makes you think it'll have better performance if it was rewritten as a native app? All the underlying code that handles audio and network communication is already built using fast C++/Rust code. This includes things like WebRTC, audio and video capture, compression, the WebAudio API, etc. 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.
- noduerme 2y agoOdd. Today I was on a Meet with my girlfriend and her audio kept dropping to silence when she would put the phone down and walk around the kitchen. If she spoke loudly enough it would cut back in. As if it was waiting to recognize voice versus ambient noise. We use Meet a lot, and I'd never noticed that happening before and wondered if it was due to some setting.
- deathanatos 2y agoI think in most VC software (including Meet) there is a threshold you have to be above, or it's considered just background noise, and not transmitted. 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.
- noduerme 2y agoI've done a fair amount of audio engineering, and my perception today of Meet was that it wasn't the simple threshold / noise gate that I would expect. For instance, I could see her moving her lips and putting down dishes, which I'm sure were noisy, but until she spoke loudly enough for a recognizable voice to overcome the dish sounds, she was essentially muted by the app. I think it was being gated based on vocal range or actual identifiable speech, not just volume. That was what seemed new to me.
- Brajeshwar 2y agoA bit off-topic but I'm going to take this opportunity to ask for help. In Zoom, I can share multiple screens/windows at once by CMD + Selecting multiple windows. How do I do that in Google Meet. I want to do a presentation and I want to show/share two separate screens/windows (not monitors) at once.
- ClassyJacket 2y agoGoogle Meet? They made another one? I can't keep up. Is this a replacement for Hangouts? Allo? Duo? This is so confusing.
- eichin 2y agoLiterally another one: one of the things Google Meet replaces... is Google Meet (original) from 2017.
- perryizgr8 2y ago> Available for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on. What does this mean?
- robbyiq999 2y agoWhat if the resulting audio output of the digitally converted human vocalization has an inaudible frequency modulation or signature added to it which operates in a range inaudible to the human ear, you could then detect said signal and filtered out its source or merged / manipulated Now fixing search, that would be truly mind blowing.
- danielbln 2y agoWhat search? Some search within Meets? Or are you talking about Google Search in general, in which case I don't think the Meets team has much to do with that.
- Dockson 2y agoI'm surprised no one here has mentioned around.co yet. They've had this feature for years which was the main reason our team has been using it. Good to see other services catching up.
- jetofff 2y agojust came by to see if anybody mentioned around.co super cool tech, but was hard to convince my org to use it over Zoom/Meet
- andy_ppp 2y agoI’ve thought about why you couldn’t do this forever! Amazing technology but I always thought multiple audio input should be able to make a room a better source not worse and full of feedback.
- urbandw311er 2y agoFantastic idea. This is the first actually useful (as in “step change useful”, not just “here’s another way of browsing your cat photos”) feature I’ve seen from Google in years.
- gcr 2y agoIf this works externally anywhere close to as well as it worked internally, this is going to be incredibly cool.
- heeton 2y agoQuestion: hasn't around.co been doing this for years? I remember using that tool in 2022 or so, multiple people in a room with this kind of audio sync / cancellation.
- hugocbp 2y agoAmazing! 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.
- azangru 2y ago> Meet is just so much better than Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, WhatsApp Video, etc. So much better? Does Meet have instruments for whiteboarding or on-screen annotation?
- mepiethree 2y agoYes it does. Whiteboarding requires a free add-on (e.g. FigJam, Miro) but you can add that in-call
- user3939382 2y agoI want to be able to customize a route in desktop Google Maps and send it to my phone.