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Google Meet at least it's very obvious to tell they do this because if you talk while muted, they will show a pop-up saying that you're talking but you're muted. Whether this functionality is justification for more nefarious data usage remains to be seen.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lots of the mutes for external mics still do it in software. The software may run on the microphone itself and not the host computer, but still. I don't trust it. Give me something that interrupts a circuit. Many laptops (notably including MacBooks) can be damaged by even fairly thin camera covers. Which sucks, because they should very obviously be standard .
Most MacBooks are also designed so the camera “on” light is impossible to disable in software.
Google Meet at least it's very obvious to tell they do this because if you talk while muted, they will show a pop-up saying that you're talking but you're muted. Whether this functionality is justification for more nefarious data usage remains to be seen.
I have to cough a lot, so I have a headset with a flip-to-mute mic. As a result, I don't generally use in-software mute effects. :/
I feel like they're trying to make an insidious suggestion about the usage of these. IMO, there's likely a good reason - user experience. At a hardware level, grabbing the microphone can take time. Even worse that timing is inconsistent across devices, workloads, etc. That leads to a bad experience when unmuting and needing to delay your commentary. The solution to this is to keep the microphone on, but mute at a sof…
Teams has a notice that it pops up if you're talking and on mute, and there's another for if you're not on mute but your mic is producing no signal (mic has it's own mute). I find those super helpful, personally.
Google Meet at least it's very obvious to tell they do this because if you talk while muted, they will show a pop-up saying that you're talking but you're muted. Whether this functionality is justification for more nefarious data usage remains to be seen.
These things implemented somewhere in the middle of the stack seems dangerous. I much more prefer a slider switch. Preferably made from real atoms and molecules.
Use a Mute Me device. https://muteme.com/
How would that help here?
Google Meet at least it's very obvious to tell they do this because if you talk while muted, they will show a pop-up saying that you're talking but you're muted. Whether this functionality is justification for more nefarious data usage remains to be seen.
Couldn’t this be done by using some ML on the video stream?
Deactivating the microphone usually is seen as a signal by the OS to switch Bluetooth headphones from two-way conferencing mode (low latency, mediocre quality) back to "music" mode (high latency, good quality). This usually takes 2-3 seconds and disrupts all sound being played (most notably other people talking in the meeting).
I wouldn't want that to happen every time I mute myself.
Continuing to send data to the conferencing bridge is indeed quite shady. Hopefully this would just be (encrypted) silence or comfort noise parameters, which can be useful to e.g. keep NAT mappings alive.
I feel like they're trying to make an insidious suggestion about the usage of these. IMO, there's likely a good reason - user experience. At a hardware level, grabbing the microphone can take time. Even worse that timing is inconsistent across devices, workloads, etc. That leads to a bad experience when unmuting and needing to delay your commentary. The solution to this is to keep the microphone on, but mute at a sof…
I'm not sure how that can be justified. Besides privacy, the issue is that this prevents the sound card from going to sleep, which may be an issue on laptops. But I guess this is insignificant compared to the rest of Teams' power consumption.