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Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

pragli.com

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Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#41

Post by RL_Quine »

leetrout wrote: post #34
LeonB wrote: post #13

I have a friend who uses an always on audio for his entirely remote team and swears by it. I think it might depend on personality types. I’m willing to admit it does work for some teams even if my own initial reaction is “no way!”

I LOVE having always on push to talk audio like mumble or discord. If you want to focus just log off. If you want to chat with the group jump in. Want to have a side convo without screen share? Pop to another channel. Mumble (speex codec) is great quality and low latency. Just has a poor UI / UX.

The UX isn't all that bad other than on mobile, which is one of the worst experiences imaginable. I use it pretty regularly and the comments about the quality and latency really bear out. There's a weird issue with the server that the longer it stays up, the longer authentication takes (up to 60s on our server now), but that's only a minor issue that's probably fixable trivially if we cared.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#44

Post by samstave »

p_l wrote: post #2

So it removes one of the biggest benefits of remote work, ability to concentrate?

I e always found it funny how HN seems to put remote work on such a pedestal... some people cant concentrate remotely. Kids are a huge distraction, as are many other comforts of the home.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#45

Post by xfalcox »

leetrout wrote: post #34
LeonB wrote: post #13

I have a friend who uses an always on audio for his entirely remote team and swears by it. I think it might depend on personality types. I’m willing to admit it does work for some teams even if my own initial reaction is “no way!”

I LOVE having always on push to talk audio like mumble or discord. If you want to focus just log off. If you want to chat with the group jump in. Want to have a side convo without screen share? Pop to another channel. Mumble (speex codec) is great quality and low latency. Just has a poor UI / UX.

I'm trying to convince my team to adopt a opt-in, voice only watercooler like that for some time, without success so far.

I makes a lot of sense to me, who have been doing this for over a decade with my friends.

Are you busy, don't join / mute yourself / go to the afk channel.

Are you waiting for a long build, just reading HN, between tasks? Join the channel and people can bond and talk about work/life.

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#46

Post by errantmind »

ironmagma wrote: post #38
katzgrau wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But there's no way for the interruptor to know the priority of their issue relative to the your priorities. This creates a major time management issue. If you have time blocked off for important, high value tasks, you can be easily distracted by someone else's lower level tasks. Task switching, especially to focus on low level tasks, is highly inefficient in both the short and long term and should be avoided at most…

Sure, but isn’t that true in the remote world as well? I can’t imagine it’s very good form to just reject a call or ignore it when you’re busy doing something else, you have to provide a reply to the person about why you can’t talk, and then that’s just as good as having done the same thing to a person physically in your office.

In my experience, ignoring someone stopping by your desk is very different from not answering the phone. A phone call doesn't have the same degree of immediacy nor the same expectations of a response

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#47

Post by thrwaway69 »

ollifi wrote: post #37

I've worked remote with a small team by having image of me on a monitor. I heard what was talked around the monitor and could push-to-talk comment back. It didn't feel distracting the way receiving a phone call while being remote felt. It's clunky enough that people didn't come up unless they had to and I still could keep up with the verbal information that was passed along with the office gossip. Some people get rea…

That sounds weird and awesome at the same time. Does the face move at all? Have you thought of using facerigging software?

I wonder what you think of virtual remote space with advanced face rigged avatars as the future?

0] https://facerig.com

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#49

Post by ironmagma »

errantmind wrote: post #46
ironmagma wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but isn’t that true in the remote world as well? I can’t imagine it’s very good form to just reject a call or ignore it when you’re busy doing something else, you have to provide a reply to the person about why you can’t talk, and then that’s just as good as having done the same thing to a person physically in your office.

In my experience, ignoring someone stopping by your desk is very different from not answering the phone. A phone call doesn't have the same degree of immediacy nor the same expectations of a response

How is a phone call not the highest form of immediacy? Short of an actual pager event implying downtime and process, what could be higher priority to someone working out of office?

Re: Building a walkie-talkie for remote work

#50

Post by dsaffy »

thrwaway69 wrote: post #47
ollifi wrote: post #37

I've worked remote with a small team by having image of me on a monitor. I heard what was talked around the monitor and could push-to-talk comment back. It didn't feel distracting the way receiving a phone call while being remote felt. It's clunky enough that people didn't come up unless they had to and I still could keep up with the verbal information that was passed along with the office gossip. Some people get rea…

That sounds weird and awesome at the same time. Does the face move at all? Have you thought of using facerigging software? I wonder what you think of virtual remote space with advanced face rigged avatars as the future? 0] https://facerig.com

We actually have a feature in Pragli that sort of does this... https://pragli.com/blog/live-avatars-with-faceapi-js/
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