Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

workspaceupdates.googleblog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 279 posts

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#121

Post by paulryanrogers »

emptysongglass wrote: post #62
unixhero wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not complicate matters.

It does in ways you likely don't understand. At large enterprises with satellite offices, most of us don't want to sit at our desks and annoy our coworkers who are also in-office by taking calls at our desks. That leaves meeting rooms, which are at a premium. Full single device for everyone would mean either everyone loudly shouting at their desks from within their noise canceling headphones or the company giving eve…

Perhaps headphones, cubicles, or offices per person could help?

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#122

Post by vultour »

emptysongglass wrote: post #62
unixhero wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This does not complicate matters.

It does in ways you likely don't understand. At large enterprises with satellite offices, most of us don't want to sit at our desks and annoy our coworkers who are also in-office by taking calls at our desks. That leaves meeting rooms, which are at a premium. Full single device for everyone would mean either everyone loudly shouting at their desks from within their noise canceling headphones or the company giving eve…

I worked for a large company with offices all over the globe where 95% of meetings were online. I worked there for several years and don't remember anyone ever complaining about the setup, even though we were in an open office.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#123

Post by PeterStuer »

samcheng wrote: post #46
buro9 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Meet did "autorecord" combined with "autoshare recording with recipients" (specifically including Google Group recipients)... then it would be perfect. As it is, we're gradually shifting more things to Zoom where that's either part basic functionality, or part easy to automate as things like Zapier are well integrated into the API. We only use Meet for team meetings now, and we did use Gong.io to solve the above..…

Hmm. We natively record and transcribe many meetings via Meet. Maybe it’s a function of the plan we’re on? I wouldn’t want “autorecord” though - it’s better for culture and rapport to not feel like every conversation is “on the record.”

You might be surprised finding out that nearly all meetings are recorded by one or more participants for transcription, automatic notes, summaries and action points.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#124

Post by PeterStuer »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #119
varispeed wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The organisation I worked at used Meet until someone from Microsoft convinced them to use Teams. Such a nightmare. Quality of meetings went downhill and employees were penalised for secretly using Meet for ad hoc meetings.

> employees were penalised for secretly using Meet for ad hoc meetings. Why would someone ever be secretly punished?

Microsoft convinced the CIO that they can't meet regulatory requirements unless everything is recorded and under central compliance records management.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#125

Post by jauntywundrkind »

crazygringo wrote: post #77

I just want to say that this is really actually kind of mind-blowing from an audio engineering perspective. Outputting audio from multiple laptops in the same room is easy. Perfectly syncing it is harder. Implementing echo cancellation across all of that is quite a bit trickier than regular single-device echo cancellation. But then treating all the laptop microphones as a kind of microphone array, having to deal with…

I too am in awe of the audio engineering challenges and opportunities here.

But I don't necessarily know that Meet is trying to tackle all this? Are they using the mics as a microphone array & processing signals across phases? Could be missing it but I don't see that they said so. Perhaps they're just picking the loudest mic for a given speaker? Or any of a dozen other simpler tactics?

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#126

Post by maliker »

nh2 wrote: post #118
maliker wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then there's another nag prompt if bluetooth headphones/mic are detected. The latency on those things can get horrendous, up to like 300 ms.

Exactly! I was shocked to learn that the latency from laptop to ear is higher than to the other side of the planet. Most people don't notice the adverse psychological aspects of this: People get really annoyed by when constantly talking over each other. It subconciously makes you dread talking to the other person. When everybody is using wired headphones, you suddenly like your coworkers more!

And then there are apps/OSes that set the mic gain at like 5% of max, so everyone else has to put their volume at 95%.

We should probably get off hacker news and just start building a teleconferencing app.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#127

Post by akira2501 »

dewey wrote: post #98
andai wrote: post #52

Sounds imprrssive, but also overengineered? Don't headphones solve the same problem? Though I guess in a hybrid meeting they'd make it harder to hear the people in the room. (But you'd hear them through the laptop, normally? I guess there would be an uncanny delay...)

I think you miss-understood the feature. It fixes the issue where there's multiple people in a room joining the same meeting from their laptops while sitting next to each other. It basically combines all microphones / speakers in that room into one big speaker / microphone just like a fancy conference setup.

> just like a fancy conference setup.

Cool, so now I can get high fidelity audio of the guy in the corner surreptitiously trying to eat a bag of chips on Google Meet now too?

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#128

Post by gomox »

parpfish wrote: post #31
echelon wrote: post #6

Meet and Google Docs are perfect Google products. I'm disapponted when people send me Zoom meetings or want to meet on Slack. Google Meet is a 10x better experience.

I love meet because of how well it’s integrated with google cal

There's a Zoom plugin for GCal that makes Zoom's integration identical to Meet, including mobile app integration.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#129

Post by dewey »

akira2501 wrote: post #127
dewey wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you miss-understood the feature. It fixes the issue where there's multiple people in a room joining the same meeting from their laptops while sitting next to each other. It basically combines all microphones / speakers in that room into one big speaker / microphone just like a fancy conference setup.

> just like a fancy conference setup. Cool, so now I can get high fidelity audio of the guy in the corner surreptitiously trying to eat a bag of chips on Google Meet now too?

That sounds like a problem that you shouldn't solve with technology.

Re: Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

#130

Post by moomoo11 »

DrammBA wrote: post #105
moomoo11 wrote: post #32

Meet is nice, but could the screen sharing view just please take 100% height/width? I hate that I have to always manually tweak it through dev tools to make it usable. How many 400k TC engineers and misguided product managers does it take to make that change? FFS

Are you using firefox? I use this extension called Stylus that lets you write custom css for pages and automatically apply it when you visit the page. There's probably something similar for chromium browsers

Yeah but why do they make the UX so painful? Its their product, they should make it better for the people who use it every day. WHy make our lives worse lol wtf, its good software so I obviously like using it, and want this small change and I'm sure someone like Google can swing it
Post reply on HN