Wtf happened to hangouts? How many video products does google have?
Hangouts is EOL :-(
We're being herded into the new more useless products.
Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
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Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#12The example video clips in the post look nothing like me and my team's view when using the new feature. Most of the time half of our hair gets blurred or replaced and hand gestures will cause either our hands or head to disappear.
I'm wondering why they didn't just use standard CV techniques like background subtraction? Does their technique work with a dynamic background as well?
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#13Blur is awesome. Way better, less distracting, than backgrounds. Everyone who try it uses it permanently because it works so well.
I also think it makes the subject look better for some reason.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#14Happy to see ML become mainstream. In the future, I don't think ML will be a separate field of programming. It'll just be "programming," the same way webdev is. There's a tendency to think of ML as "not programming," or something other than just plain programming. But as the tooling matures, that'll go away. (Lisp used to be considered "AI programming," till it became useful in many other contexts.)
ML will become a library. It has about as much to do with programming as a compiler. You don't need to know what it does, you just need to know how to make it do things. The problem with ML currently is that nobody really knows how to do things and that you have a million parameters that need tuning and most algorithms need continuous improvement and fine tuning to the use case. There is nothing "mainstream" about ML…
Fwiw macs have had an equivalent functionality for both text to speech and speech to text for at least 17 years to my memory. The quality is poor compared to today's server-driven approaches, of course, but the functionality has been there if you're willing to articulate yourself clearly.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#15Sony released some software a couple of months ago that lets you use most of their DSLRs as webcams with USB. My goodness, paired with a fast lens, what a difference to my MacBook webcam, even with these ml blurred backgrounds!
It's only 720p and around 15fps but real shallow dof, very little sensor noise, autofocus works. Well worth trying if you have a Sony camera from the last few years.
Sensor size and good optics still wins. Having said that,the effort and detail gone into this feature is very impressive, enjoyed the blog post. Also webassembly SIMD looks super cool, looking forward to a new class of webapps using wasm.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#16Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#17Unrelated to the ML, but I don't like the fact I noticed that all the people in the clips are "diverse".
No clue whether Google did this on purpose, but I feel like I've been trained to notice this due to the diversity movement thing currently occurring and I don't like it.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#18Honestly it's the worst implementation I've seen of this technology yet. Just absolute and total garbage.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#19Unrelated to the ML, but I don't like the fact I noticed that all the people in the clips are "diverse". No clue whether Google did this on purpose, but I feel like I've been trained to notice this due to the diversity movement thing currently occurring and I don't like it.
In this particular case, why is testing/demonstrating on diverse set of individuals a bad thing ?
A personal anecdote is that a few years back the automatic door sensors in my university did not work on my skin tone.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#20The example video clips in the post look nothing like me and my team's view when using the new feature. Most of the time half of our hair gets blurred or replaced and hand gestures will cause either our hands or head to disappear.
It seems to have gotten a little better recently, but my experience matches yours. It really struggles when I wear over-ear headphones - they sort of phase in and out of existence.
The other thing I've noticed is the background blur absolutely annihilates my CPU. To the point where I would rather just turn off my camera if I don't want my background visible.