This is why I go to sound preferences in my OS and turn my mic input level to 0.
You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
221–230 of 353 posts
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#222If they don't listen when your mic is off how are they going to remind you that you're talking but you forgot to unmute?
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#223I 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…
Exactly the reason I use a headset with a boom mic. Flip it up to mute, and back down to activate. Love it.
wait till the wear and tear on that hinge breaks from doing this 50 times a day lol
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#224flush
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly, it feels like most people here aren't reading the article. > The researchers then decided to see if they could use data collected on mute from that app to infer the types of activities taking place in the background. Using machine learning algorithms, they trained an activity classifier using audio from YouTube videos representing six common background activities, including cooking and eating, playing music…
"They found that all of the apps they tested occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated, with one popular app gathering information and delivering data to its server at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not." The way I read that is, only one of the apps actually sends audio data to the server when the mic is muted. I'm not sure why they don't say which one, and I'm not sur…
"occasionally gather raw audio data" could be used to remind you that you're muted when you're trying to talk. I've seen that in either GoToMeeting or Zoom
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
In like 25% of my meetings, somebody is accidentally muted while they are trying to speak. The popup speeds up the process of them unmuting.
I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Having used Discord for so many years, this has never been a problem aside from a select few people who had very clear reason to mute themselves. Meanwhile in professional settings, people seem to be falling for this over and over while lacking the common curtesy of not letting random environmental noise bleed through (read: their mics are barely ever tur…
Main reason why I invested in a mic that has its own mute button with a very obvious red light when it's muted.
It also can keep the Teams mute status in sync as long as I don't touch it in the app myself (I believe through Teams detecting whether the mic interface is marked as muted or not, so it isn't exclusive to my mic).
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#227If you make a noise while muted, Zoom pop up a dialog saying something like "warning, you're muted!"
So that was kind of a giveaway that zoom is accessing the mic when muted, not really a secret.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#228I 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 susceptibl…
Just throwing it out there but maybe to avoid bandwidth spikes that might lead to latency depending on the setup, could you inject some kind of easily identifiable "is muted" signal along with white noise in place of silences? or would that sort of pre-mixing be too slow to do in real time on the client side?
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also kept microfone on after closing calls, and reverted after getting caught https://thinksproutinfotech.com/news/zoom-update-fixes-macos...
Seriously, who in their right mind is using Zoom at this point? They've been "accidentally" collecting people's data, disclosing people's data to others, and have been caught lying so many times there's nearly zero chance that it's just total incompetence and even if it were, why use something made by people who are that bad at their job? There are so many alternatives, how is it Zoom has any business at all?
This morning my boss tried to host a meeting on his favorite Zoom substitute. The first 20 minutes were spent trying to fix a ten second delay in his audio. Finally we just switched to a Zoom call, and it worked flawlessly.
There are only two videoconferencing platforms I've never had any problems with: Zoom and Google Meet. I don't trust either company, but sometimes you just have to get your work done.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
In like 25% of my meetings, somebody is accidentally muted while they are trying to speak. The popup speeds up the process of them unmuting.
I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Having used Discord for so many years, this has never been a problem aside from a select few people who had very clear reason to mute themselves. Meanwhile in professional settings, people seem to be falling for this over and over while lacking the common curtesy of not letting random environmental noise bleed through (read: their mics are barely ever tur…
Because in Discord you hop into an audio call and you're there for however long you want to hang out in the room. People can come and go from this room, but the room is persistent. In a job, you're going from meeting to meeting each with different attendees and stakeholders. You might have been on top of it in the morning for standup then 3 hours and a head full of code/spreadsheets/whatever later when you're discussing tech debt with other people you forget to unmute until your portion of the meeting comes 5 minutes into the start. Push-to-talk certainly helps, but if you're frequently talking in small meetings (say 3-5 people) then PTT becomes more of a hindrance than a help.
Personally I just have a headset with hardware mute functionality and a big red circle showing me it's muted. It remembers its muted status, so I just mute it by default and default my OS to use the headset's mic. That way I know quickly and easily when I'm muted and when I'm not, though even then I have small mistakes in the mornings when I'm tired. Over time I've optimized my meeting workflow because my company has gone all remote and I'm in a lot of meetings.