Sony released some software a couple of months ago that lets you use most of their DSLRs as webcams with USB. My goodness, paired with a fast lens, what a difference to my MacBook webcam, even with these ml blurred backgrounds!
It's only 720p and around 15fps but real shallow dof, very little sensor noise, autofocus works. Well worth trying if you have a Sony camera from the last few years.
Sensor size and good optics still wins. Having said that,the effort and detail gone into this feature is very impressive, enjoyed the blog post. Also webassembly SIMD looks super cool, looking forward to a new class of webapps using wasm.
I recently tried to get a setup similar to this with a Fujifilm X-T20 I had lying around, remembering that Fujifilm announced similar software. Alas, that software only works with their higher end models.
I ended up getting a $10 HDMI USB capture stick from Aliexpress. I get a perfect 1080p/60fps signal, and at least on Linux it worked out of the box with Zoom.
The only problem now is that most of my meetings start with "wow, why do you look like you're on TV?"
Canon did too! Definitely a huge upgrade over a typical webcam.
I'm using my old T1i which can be had for less than $50 these days, plus you can pick up a 18-55mm kit lens for like $20 and the video quality blows away any webcam, especially for the same price. Also recommend battery->power adapter.
Canon and Nikon do too. In practice, the quality bump is nice, but we are still talking of a fairly low res/bit rate when it gets through Zoom so the end result is fairly underwhelming. As far as what the other people see on their wnd.
Yeah.. both Zoom and Google Meet have >720p video but the bitrate especially on Zoom is a travesty, 600kbps/1.2mbps stream with all the different resolutions in the same stream.
The codec situation with h264/HEVC/vp9/AV1 software/hardware encoding is a mess. Hopefully we'll get wide hardware support for AV1, although it might take a while.
Woot. Thanks for pointing this out - I looked for a solution a while back and it seemed like I had to get a separate capture card to connect my Sony DSLR. Will go check this out now.
(I ended up having to buy a little logitech webcam, which has been fine, but being able to pick my lens etc is awesome!)
I use my Android (Redmi Note 8 Pro) primary cam (720p I think) using Droidcam and it works like a charm on Linux.
I also tried gPhoto2/ffmpeg and virtual cam driver with Nikon D5200 (USB) on Linux but I prefer the Redmi since I do not have a decent low light lens for my DSLR.
Having used both Zoom and Meet extensively now for the past 6 months, my experience is:
1/ Your internet connection, especially upload bandwidth and latency matter a lot.
2/ Zoom's desktop app performs very well, but its web version is atrocious. Not just because of the dark patterns they use to force you to install the desktop app, but also its performance is terrible compared to its desktop version, as well as worse than almost everything else. Unfortunately, I don't trust them and refuse to use their desktop app on anything but my iPad.
3/ Meet used to be bad like Zoom on web 6 months ago, but has improved a lot and is slowly approaching Zoom desktop in performance. I have noticed that Meet on my work GSuite calls at work perform much better than on my personal account. This might be explained by #1 above I.e. my family has worse internet connections than my coworkers, but I am not sure if all improvements have been rolled out to personal accounts.
> 1/ Your internet connection, especially upload bandwidth and latency matter a lot.
I moved to a new house, and the quality of my video calls dropped dramatically. Constant freezing and dropouts. It was extremely frustrating to try to participate in a meeting. I could receive fine, but anytime I spoke out, I would drop out within minutes.
Speed tests showed plenty of bandwidth, but my modem statistics showed high upstream power levels, occasionally out of the allowed range, and lots of "uncorrectable" packets.
I finally got a Comcast technician in to look at it (yay for business-class support), and they replaced the cable from the pole all the way to the first splitter in the basement, and since then it's been flawless. 100/15 Megabit service has been totally adequate for our needs, so long as it's reliable and the latency is low enough.
It kills me that our city isn't putting in conduits or fiber while doing utility work, though. The whole time that was happening, there were gas contractors opening the street and running new supply lines to every house, but not putting in any extra conduits or dark fiber. The construction sounds were almost like being back in the office...
Today I took a flawless webex meeting on a laptop tethered to my mobile phone, that same tether also allowed me to work without issue over rdp or whatever.
My mobile internet is really fucking good, and often outperforms my sodding wired connection
>1/ Your internet connection, especially upload bandwidth and latency matter a lot.
It grates me when people claim DSL/cable qualifies as sufficiently good broadband in the US because of the lack of upload bandwidth and slow latency (can add packet loss in here too). The situation is so bad that you can't even find how much upload bandwidth so called "broadband" cable ISPs offer.
The experience on symmetric fiber connections is noticeably improved, and we can have a house with a whole group of people streaming video up and down simultaneously without a hiccup. Such as in times of work from home and school from home.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but not Meet).
For the last item, personal accounts (only?) default to send and receive video at lower resolution (360p). So if you meant that the quality is lower, you can set it on both sides to 720p.
Edit: I don’t think Meet remembers those settings though, so you have to do it every time (and show your family members how to do so).
As a legacy free GApps user it is even more confusing because the admin page gives me an option to default to higher quality video but that doesn't do anything.
Why does Google, with all the resources at its disposal, choose to cheap out like this when competitors in the video chat space (from tiny startups to gigantic corporation of similar size) have offered near native resolution video chat for ages?
Meet certanly rolls out improvements for GSuite before public ones. I think there's even a GSuite setting of "release channel" where you can control how early you get these improvements.
I refuse to install Zoom. They have removed the dark pattern, and the "join via browser" option is almost immediately available. If you have it installed, now is a good time to uninstall it.
The example video clips in the post look nothing like me and my team's view when using the new feature. Most of the time half of our hair gets blurred or replaced and hand gestures will cause either our hands or head to disappear.
I can vouch for this. I haven’t really needed the background blur feature personally, but I’ve tried it and both myself, colleagues, and friends — pretty much everyone I’ve talked to that has used it — loathe Google Meet’s background blur, and prefer Zoom’s by far.
In my experience, it doesn’t completely cover the background most of the time, and if you move at all, as you point out, it can’t keep up.
Kind of funny to see Google engineering blogging about it when it feels extremely half baked.
This makes me sad, because in all other areas, I think Meet excels well beyond the competition.
"Half baked" misrepresents the difficulty this task. Yes, Zoom does it better, but it's _still_ an excellent and interesting engineering accomplishment.
I've always wondered what proportion of modern real-time video effects rely on ML vs. classical image processing; this not only answers that question, but provides details down to the level of model architecture and the final latency and IOU benchmarks.
Of course I'd be more interested to read how Zoom manages to do even better, but I'm not holding my breath for them to publish those details.
At least for background blur the latency there is enough to make it almost unusable: easily over 100ms. This is with latest stable Chrome on a relatively recent Ryzen/Nvidia system. Maybe background replacement will do better once it rolls down to regular Google Meet (too lazy to log into my Google <del>Apps</del> <del>Suite</del> Workspace) :-) However, everything else about Google Meet is great and I wish I could make all my Zoom friends switch.
It seems to have gotten a little better recently, but my experience matches yours. It really struggles when I wear over-ear headphones - they sort of phase in and out of existence.
The other thing I've noticed is the background blur absolutely annihilates my CPU. To the point where I would rather just turn off my camera if I don't want my background visible.
They have their example video clips, but they also provide data. They say that in their better model, They get an IoU of 93.8% This means 6.2% of pixels are misclassified. Either it's your hair getting cut off or the background is leaking through. 6.2% of an image is a fair bit considering your head is probably 30% of the frame.
I'm wondering why they didn't just use standard CV techniques like background subtraction? Does their technique work with a dynamic background as well?
I’ve done some work in this space - subtraction doesn’t perform well when other motion is present, whereas if you use pose / body detection you can ignore other bodies in view (i.e, the toddler running across the room).
Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn.
Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.
Isn't this sort of a Fizz Buzz for a UX/UI design professional? I don't mean to demean anyone, but I see this sort of a thing literally everywhere. Hiding important and absolutely crucial information (that can make or break your product) in the name of minimalism. Coming out of a company that has one of the highest hiring bars for software engineering, and yet, their products have such an awful UX/UI. This isn't an exception, it is a pattern.
I worked as a freelance graphic artist/web designer once and while I wasn't bad at the job, I really hated one aspect of it:
Everybody and their kid thought they knew better than I did. When I said: "Yeah but this should really be visible, because accessibility", they would say: " But it looks better if..."
People in high paid position certainly want "has taste" and "knows what looks good" to be part of their self image. Many fails in design and architecture happen for that reason alone.
I then ended up programming and working in film sound, because very few people in both fields tell you what to do when they have no idea what's going on.
Ironically forgetting that visual minimalism produced by hiding things isn’t really minimalism.
It would be like me throwing all my things in the garage and advertising my house as Spartan. No, it’s not, it’s a mess. The mess is just hidden until I need to do something.
"Hiding important and absolutely crucial information"
If we want to give awards for this my vote would go to Apple. I find their products to be horrific when it comes to completely undiscoverable features. iOS is bad on its own but the Apple TV is a total train wreck. I couldn't get rid of that thing with its awful interface and remote fast enough.
Exactly. Everybody does this. In anything using video, UI elements apparently need to be hidden as much as possible. In virtual meetings, Youtube, and it's often an option in games.
And sometimes it's great, because you get to focus on the content, and sometimes it's not, because you lose control. It's something that should be optional or configurable. It's great to have shortcuts for the most common commands (like space for pause in youtube), and I guess it would make a lot of sense if video conferencing tools also had such a shortcut for mute/unmute.
But again, give people more control over their UI. There are too many applications that mess this up one way or another.
This is true. I find Android UI so offensive that if I did not have iOS as an alternate I probably would carry a dumb phone and live like a monk. I can’t stand the miles of white space and brightly coloured tiny UI controls.
Evokes such a visceral reaction in me that even I am startled at times haha
More important than the button is the status indicator - I need to know if the call is muted or not. Even better, promote it to an OS-level icon/badge/overlay. If my mic is actively in use, please make it blindingly obvious.
The only software that gets vide-co right is probably Discord
I used MS Teams and zoom and both are decent (ms teams works fine for school)
but it's insanely unbelievable that this kind of software lacks of features that gaming communities had probably 20 years ago
PUSH TO TALK is probably one of the most important features of any voice software. The lack of it is big WTF.
It gives you 100% control over when you're talking and you don't have to alt-tab between programs in order to "mute" yourself.
You can bind it to e.g MOUSE3 (scroll-push) and it works fine with other programs, games and stuff. Switching between muted/unmuted is different thing.
From somebody who uses/used ventrilo, mumble, teamspeak and nowadays discord for like last 12 years for hours per day, almost everyday.
For push to talk to work, you need to have access to keys even when you're not in focus.
That's not something doable today on the web for obvious security reasons, but it's possible for Discord that has a separate app, would be doable for Zoom too I guess.
It’s even worse on touch devices. You have to touch the bottom screen to get the controls to appear. Accident touch twice in the wrong location and you can hang up.
I've often thought that on a touch screen device the OS should ignore touches on buttons/popups that have been on screen for less time than a human could reasonably have observed it and chosen to interact with it. If I touch the screen 0.05 seconds after a button appears, I was probably _not_ aiming for that button.
In fact, now I think about it, this has happened many times over the years with traditional mouse drive interfaces too.
I'm sure some power users would like to shorten the 'reaction time delay' or even remove it entirely so I guess that should be an option as well.
The mute/unmute changes position and can be hidden in a top bar that slides out.
In some fullscreen situations there is no button to get out of fullscreen. Sometimes double-click works, sometimes it doesn't. Recently I could not even alt-tab away, basically my computer got 'locked' by zoom.
I imagine most know this by now but the space bar works as a push to talk button in Zoom (as long as it has focus of course).
I really think there is a market for a physical video conference controller. If I could get a hefty slab of something with quality buttons to enable/disable video, push to talk/mute/unmute, bring to foreground, ‘on air’ light and end call, I’d easily pay $100 for it.
Zoom does this well on the iOS app. They call it "safe driving mode" [1] and half your screen essentially becomes the must/unmute button. You can either tap it or swipe left to unmute.
And stop telling me I'm using an input different than the output. I have a condenser microphone on an audio interface with RTX Voice; no, it's not going to transmit an echo.
To be fair a lot of sites do need it, especially for more power user level UX. See BetterTTV, RES, etc. Sites generally don't target power users, understandably.
Zoom at least uses Cmd+Shift-A for Audio and V for Video
But as the recent Google Icon kerfuffle, UI/UX is not their strength (probably because of opinionated technical people that think you need to A/B shades of blue)
Speaking of mute/unmute I've not yet found a way to get Google Hangouts (same thing as Meet?) to play nice in situations where simultaneous interpretation is involved. Our company works in Japanese and English and we typically have a second meeting running in parallel for interpretation. This setup almost works, I say almost because I've yet to find a way of muting the audio in one meeting so I can properly listen to the other. I can't leave the first meeting either because often I'll also want to see the presentation slides. Currently I'm working around this by muting my MacBook and joining the second meeting on my phone.
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious (or a Chrome plugin that will allow me to mute based on the page URL rather than site). In the unlikely event that a Googler is reading this I'm not asking for yet another product or complicated new piece of functionality aimed at this specific use case. Just a mute button for audio. Thanks!
A major motivation why I got a StreamDeck was to be able to put a big fat mute button that "physically" kills the microhone level at the source.
It renders a big cross through the microphone when muted.
Simple, yet insanely effective UI (#).
Best thing ever.
#) Especially when compared to the mess that is Google Meet. My favourite "feature" of theirs is how when someone is presenting, it's impossible to view the presentation as just another stream - no they have to make it dominate everything, meaning it's so hard to see the other team members.
And it can be extremely hard to see who's talking when viewing a lot of cameras at the same time. And for whatever reason the quality turns to a blurry mess a far cry from 720p just way too often. (I have fibre internet).
When did you recently use Meet? I just used it yesterday with a gaming session with friends and the console for the mute / unmute was visible at all times. I even just tried it right now.
While you're at it, always display a vu-meter. It gives feedback on what is transmitted and thus can alert a user whether they are being heard or not. It's the most basic of sound recording tools, and was a standard part of recording equipment for over half a century for good reason.
And if you need minimalism, offer a toggle for that. But I think most people should have it forced on them, would save anyone a lot of trouble -- just think about all the aggregate time lost talking into a muted mike by all users.
We are in the era of three seashells. There is no turning back from this. Soon you won't be able to find the power button for anything tech industry related.
Which is so odd as CTRL-D is also the bookmark shortcut in Google Chrome. So, say for example, my team has a goto channel where we have our ad-hoc meetings. It's a pain to bookmark it for later use without jumping through the gui.
MS Teams has finally changed this on their video calls. Ah the hours I spent telling colleagues 'If you move your mouse around, you should see a black bar appear somewhere near the middle llof the screen'.
Happy to see ML become mainstream. In the future, I don't think ML will be a separate field of programming. It'll just be "programming," the same way webdev is.
There's a tendency to think of ML as "not programming," or something other than just plain programming. But as the tooling matures, that'll go away.
(Lisp used to be considered "AI programming," till it became useful in many other contexts.)
ML will become a library. It has about as much to do with programming as a compiler. You don't need to know what it does, you just need to know how to make it do things. The problem with ML currently is that nobody really knows how to do things and that you have a million parameters that need tuning and most algorithms need continuous improvement and fine tuning to the use case. There is nothing "mainstream" about ML at this point, except that everyone wants to use it.
In maybe a decade, it might be found in standard libraries of programming languages and on top of things like `Math.abs`, we will have `ML.textToSpeech("Hello world")`, or `ML.isCat(image)`, etc. However, the problem I see with that is that no matter how far we wind the clock forward, we will only be able to put the most simplistic use cases into a library. `ML.isCat()` could be one of those, since most humans will be able to image categorization, it stands to reason that you could put this into a library. However, most industry application involved highly customized ML algorithms that are optimized for a very specific use-case. So there will always be a need for a research team in big companies at least. Maybe smaller companies will try to build their stuff by chaining libraries together.
There's never going to be a `ML.isCat(image)`, just like there isn't a `Math.solveProblem(hypothesis)`. Yes you do have `Math.abs` and you're going to have stuff `model.fit()` and `layers.dense()` - but something like `ML.isCat` is too specific to be used in a library
Fwiw macs have had an equivalent functionality for both text to speech and speech to text for at least 17 years to my memory. The quality is poor compared to today's server-driven approaches, of course, but the functionality has been there if you're willing to articulate yourself clearly.
AI is learning existing patterns from input/outputs.
Programming is setting up patterns to turn your inputs into desired outputs. Most often it's just plumbing data around with some transformations.
What you're talking about is using AI as programming tools. It's still programming, but using pre-trained models as part of the plumbing.
I am going to admit that Nvidia Broadcast looks absolutely amazing to me. It's likely to be the reason why my next GPU won't be AMD's new, even though it appears to deliver much more bang for the buck.
I already have RTX Voice now and it's the best thing ever.
No, because tech people want software that works, has good UX etc. This is a PR piece for people that prefer software that has cutsie little backgrounds.
Readit News
It's only 720p and around 15fps but real shallow dof, very little sensor noise, autofocus works. Well worth trying if you have a Sony camera from the last few years.
Sensor size and good optics still wins. Having said that,the effort and detail gone into this feature is very impressive, enjoyed the blog post. Also webassembly SIMD looks super cool, looking forward to a new class of webapps using wasm.
I ended up getting a $10 HDMI USB capture stick from Aliexpress. I get a perfect 1080p/60fps signal, and at least on Linux it worked out of the box with Zoom.
The only problem now is that most of my meetings start with "wow, why do you look like you're on TV?"
I'm using my old T1i which can be had for less than $50 these days, plus you can pick up a 18-55mm kit lens for like $20 and the video quality blows away any webcam, especially for the same price. Also recommend battery->power adapter.
The codec situation with h264/HEVC/vp9/AV1 software/hardware encoding is a mess. Hopefully we'll get wide hardware support for AV1, although it might take a while.
(I ended up having to buy a little logitech webcam, which has been fine, but being able to pick my lens etc is awesome!)
I also tried gPhoto2/ffmpeg and virtual cam driver with Nikon D5200 (USB) on Linux but I prefer the Redmi since I do not have a decent low light lens for my DSLR.
1/ Your internet connection, especially upload bandwidth and latency matter a lot.
2/ Zoom's desktop app performs very well, but its web version is atrocious. Not just because of the dark patterns they use to force you to install the desktop app, but also its performance is terrible compared to its desktop version, as well as worse than almost everything else. Unfortunately, I don't trust them and refuse to use their desktop app on anything but my iPad.
3/ Meet used to be bad like Zoom on web 6 months ago, but has improved a lot and is slowly approaching Zoom desktop in performance. I have noticed that Meet on my work GSuite calls at work perform much better than on my personal account. This might be explained by #1 above I.e. my family has worse internet connections than my coworkers, but I am not sure if all improvements have been rolled out to personal accounts.
I moved to a new house, and the quality of my video calls dropped dramatically. Constant freezing and dropouts. It was extremely frustrating to try to participate in a meeting. I could receive fine, but anytime I spoke out, I would drop out within minutes.
Speed tests showed plenty of bandwidth, but my modem statistics showed high upstream power levels, occasionally out of the allowed range, and lots of "uncorrectable" packets.
I finally got a Comcast technician in to look at it (yay for business-class support), and they replaced the cable from the pole all the way to the first splitter in the basement, and since then it's been flawless. 100/15 Megabit service has been totally adequate for our needs, so long as it's reliable and the latency is low enough.
It kills me that our city isn't putting in conduits or fiber while doing utility work, though. The whole time that was happening, there were gas contractors opening the street and running new supply lines to every house, but not putting in any extra conduits or dark fiber. The construction sounds were almost like being back in the office...
My mobile internet is really fucking good, and often outperforms my sodding wired connection
It grates me when people claim DSL/cable qualifies as sufficiently good broadband in the US because of the lack of upload bandwidth and slow latency (can add packet loss in here too). The situation is so bad that you can't even find how much upload bandwidth so called "broadband" cable ISPs offer.
The experience on symmetric fiber connections is noticeably improved, and we can have a house with a whole group of people streaming video up and down simultaneously without a hiccup. Such as in times of work from home and school from home.
For the last item, personal accounts (only?) default to send and receive video at lower resolution (360p). So if you meant that the quality is lower, you can set it on both sides to 720p.
Edit: I don’t think Meet remembers those settings though, so you have to do it every time (and show your family members how to do so).
As a legacy free GApps user it is even more confusing because the admin page gives me an option to default to higher quality video but that doesn't do anything.
Why does Google, with all the resources at its disposal, choose to cheap out like this when competitors in the video chat space (from tiny startups to gigantic corporation of similar size) have offered near native resolution video chat for ages?
Are they even _trying_ to compete?
Meet was much worse than Zoom, even when I take the bad web interface of Zoom into account.
I ain't a fan of either, though.
I refuse to install Zoom. They have removed the dark pattern, and the "join via browser" option is almost immediately available. If you have it installed, now is a good time to uninstall it.
In my experience, it doesn’t completely cover the background most of the time, and if you move at all, as you point out, it can’t keep up.
Kind of funny to see Google engineering blogging about it when it feels extremely half baked.
This makes me sad, because in all other areas, I think Meet excels well beyond the competition.
EDIT: removed my general sentiment on Google
I've always wondered what proportion of modern real-time video effects rely on ML vs. classical image processing; this not only answers that question, but provides details down to the level of model architecture and the final latency and IOU benchmarks.
Of course I'd be more interested to read how Zoom manages to do even better, but I'm not holding my breath for them to publish those details.
is it _better_ than zoom tho? I my experience, I don't see much of an improvement worth switching.
The other thing I've noticed is the background blur absolutely annihilates my CPU. To the point where I would rather just turn off my camera if I don't want my background visible.
Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.
People in high paid position certainly want "has taste" and "knows what looks good" to be part of their self image. Many fails in design and architecture happen for that reason alone.
I then ended up programming and working in film sound, because very few people in both fields tell you what to do when they have no idea what's going on.
Ironically forgetting that visual minimalism produced by hiding things isn’t really minimalism.
It would be like me throwing all my things in the garage and advertising my house as Spartan. No, it’s not, it’s a mess. The mess is just hidden until I need to do something.
If we want to give awards for this my vote would go to Apple. I find their products to be horrific when it comes to completely undiscoverable features. iOS is bad on its own but the Apple TV is a total train wreck. I couldn't get rid of that thing with its awful interface and remote fast enough.
And sometimes it's great, because you get to focus on the content, and sometimes it's not, because you lose control. It's something that should be optional or configurable. It's great to have shortcuts for the most common commands (like space for pause in youtube), and I guess it would make a lot of sense if video conferencing tools also had such a shortcut for mute/unmute.
But again, give people more control over their UI. There are too many applications that mess this up one way or another.
This is true. I find Android UI so offensive that if I did not have iOS as an alternate I probably would carry a dumb phone and live like a monk. I can’t stand the miles of white space and brightly coloured tiny UI controls.
Evokes such a visceral reaction in me that even I am startled at times haha
Dead Comment
Physical button to block the microphone, LED on the button itself and a tray icon with the microphone status displayed.
I used MS Teams and zoom and both are decent (ms teams works fine for school)
but it's insanely unbelievable that this kind of software lacks of features that gaming communities had probably 20 years ago
PUSH TO TALK is probably one of the most important features of any voice software. The lack of it is big WTF.
It gives you 100% control over when you're talking and you don't have to alt-tab between programs in order to "mute" yourself.
You can bind it to e.g MOUSE3 (scroll-push) and it works fine with other programs, games and stuff. Switching between muted/unmuted is different thing.
From somebody who uses/used ventrilo, mumble, teamspeak and nowadays discord for like last 12 years for hours per day, almost everyday.
That's not something doable today on the web for obvious security reasons, but it's possible for Discord that has a separate app, would be doable for Zoom too I guess.
In fact, now I think about it, this has happened many times over the years with traditional mouse drive interfaces too.
I'm sure some power users would like to shorten the 'reaction time delay' or even remove it entirely so I guess that should be an option as well.
Deleted Comment
The mute/unmute changes position and can be hidden in a top bar that slides out. In some fullscreen situations there is no button to get out of fullscreen. Sometimes double-click works, sometimes it doesn't. Recently I could not even alt-tab away, basically my computer got 'locked' by zoom.
https://tacosteemers.com/articles/2020-10-16-ux-anti-pattern...
I really think there is a market for a physical video conference controller. If I could get a hefty slab of something with quality buttons to enable/disable video, push to talk/mute/unmute, bring to foreground, ‘on air’ light and end call, I’d easily pay $100 for it.
[1] https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/201362973-What-Is-...
The best conferencing solutions I’ve used to shame those not using video
Not that you should have to install an extension to get basic UX
But as the recent Google Icon kerfuffle, UI/UX is not their strength (probably because of opinionated technical people that think you need to A/B shades of blue)
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious (or a Chrome plugin that will allow me to mute based on the page URL rather than site). In the unlikely event that a Googler is reading this I'm not asking for yet another product or complicated new piece of functionality aimed at this specific use case. Just a mute button for audio. Thanks!
No, vastly different products. Hangouts is the legacy thing and never worked quite right for me. Meet is much better.
It works for me for Chromium on Ubuntu.
It renders a big cross through the microphone when muted.
Simple, yet insanely effective UI (#).
Best thing ever.
#) Especially when compared to the mess that is Google Meet. My favourite "feature" of theirs is how when someone is presenting, it's impossible to view the presentation as just another stream - no they have to make it dominate everything, meaning it's so hard to see the other team members.
And it can be extremely hard to see who's talking when viewing a lot of cameras at the same time. And for whatever reason the quality turns to a blurry mess a far cry from 720p just way too often. (I have fibre internet).
And if you need minimalism, offer a toggle for that. But I think most people should have it forced on them, would save anyone a lot of trouble -- just think about all the aggregate time lost talking into a muted mike by all users.
I did donate a contribution to say thank you.
I'm a 28 yr old software developer.
But you will hit a dog probably, because the steering wheel suddenly blocks your view too.
When I leave a meeting, can you please stop asking me for feedback every time and just take me back to the main meet screen?
It would be so easy just to put that small dialogue box on the main meet screen rather than prompt me to click the button to return.
Doesn't excuse the UI, but at least this lets you avoid using it!
I bought an external microphone for my laptop with a hardware mute button.
I still can't stand the bottom popping up and down and not being able to tell if I'm muted.
There's a tendency to think of ML as "not programming," or something other than just plain programming. But as the tooling matures, that'll go away.
(Lisp used to be considered "AI programming," till it became useful in many other contexts.)
In maybe a decade, it might be found in standard libraries of programming languages and on top of things like `Math.abs`, we will have `ML.textToSpeech("Hello world")`, or `ML.isCat(image)`, etc. However, the problem I see with that is that no matter how far we wind the clock forward, we will only be able to put the most simplistic use cases into a library. `ML.isCat()` could be one of those, since most humans will be able to image categorization, it stands to reason that you could put this into a library. However, most industry application involved highly customized ML algorithms that are optimized for a very specific use-case. So there will always be a need for a research team in big companies at least. Maybe smaller companies will try to build their stuff by chaining libraries together.
What you're talking about is using AI as programming tools. It's still programming, but using pre-trained models as part of the plumbing.
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Anyone who uses the blue realizes that it's far lacking in quality from other offerings and Google Meet UI is very bad also.
Zoom, Teams, even WebEx are superior quality and usability wise.
Zoom's web client is particularly terrible, and we can't install the desktop client for security reasons.
And the new background noise cancellation feature is magic.
Out of these I'm really surprised how "not as horrible" MS Teams are. Loads of functionality and the UX is bearable.
I already have RTX Voice now and it's the best thing ever.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-au/geforce/news/nvidia-broadcast-a...
Are they able to change the bg in the browser?
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Jitsi also has background blur but it's only ok-ish on Chrome and unusably slow on Firefox.