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You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

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31–40 of 353 posts

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t this be done by using some ML on the video stream?

Probably the user experience would not be as good, though, since it'd be an audio-only feature that only works if you've enabled video.

The solution is obvious: have the camera watch you even when it's "off".

:-)

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#32

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…

Completely agree, there's a lot of user friendly reasons to want the software to behave this way. I use a headset with a hardware mute that engages when I put the mic arm up, that's what I use when I want to make sure I'm muted.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#33
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most MacBooks are also designed so the camera “on” light is impossible to disable in software.

Some hardware up there must be active and sending data even when the light's not on. It's how they make the (excellent, can hardly live without it now that I'm used to it) automatic monitor color temp adjustment work, AFAIK. Though maybe that's a separate sensor from the camera proper.

That’s certainly a different sensor, called the ambient light sensor.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#34

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…

Very much this, it takes time to recapture the microphone and it's really annoying to lose the first part of what you say every time you unmute. I lead the video team at a videoconferencing app (gather.town) and we keep the microphone active when you mute for this reason.

As seems to be pretty common, for the sake of privacy we do stop sending audio to the media server. That's a tradeoff, since we're still susceptible to losing a little bit while the audio connection resumes.

Edit: as others have mentioned, also useful to keep bluetooth headsets in two-way audio mode rather than reverting to audio output mode, since that's really disruptive.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#36

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…

got a modmic - popular mic - has a button on it to mute the mic- light turns red - pushed the button and went for a pee - came back to the meeting - left again to get a drink - came back - was asked to mute my mic - light was red - clicked hardware button - red light turned off - clicked again - right light turned on - mic was still active - no longer trust hardware buttons

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#38
post #17

My team and I built some of the world's most decentralized videoconferencing software, using WebRTC. You can try it on https://yang2020.app/meeting for example ... but it's available in all of our apps, including for teachers, etc. Since a major point of our platform (qbix.com/platform) is to avoid relying on external third parties, that meant we built a version of livestreaming that is completely peer-to-peer. Imagi…

Might want to hire some marketing and product branding agency folks to make sure you are branding this in a way that seems safe and trustworthy, so people will try it out and you can increase engagement and adoption.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#39

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…

On Linux at least, Teams continue to grab the microphone even after the meeting has ended. You can see this by looking at apps registered for "recording". 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.

Teams is a real clustefuck, I do not believe it is a design decision but rather just poorly written code.

Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

#40
post #31
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably the user experience would not be as good, though, since it'd be an audio-only feature that only works if you've enabled video.

The solution is obvious: have the camera watch you even when it's "off". :-)

That is for the "You are talking, but others can't see your face" notification.
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