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Slack Calls: Now with video

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Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#101

Post by petarb »

aluminussoma wrote: post #14

Has anyone else noticed how pristine the audio quality of a Slack call sounds? I wonder how they optimized it. My company's voip, and Lync, and Skype all fail to deliver the same kind of call quality. I've only noticed / admired better call quality when making a call within Cisco to another employee. I don't use video much but I hope they've done as good of a job as they did with audio.

As weird as this is, every time I've done a slack audio call, I only he's audio from my right speaker on my MacBook Pro. It's like the eliminated the whole left channel. Sane behavior on multiple computers as well.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#102

Post by abalashov »

Spooky23 wrote: post #82
aluminussoma wrote: post #14

Has anyone else noticed how pristine the audio quality of a Slack call sounds? I wonder how they optimized it. My company's voip, and Lync, and Skype all fail to deliver the same kind of call quality. I've only noticed / admired better call quality when making a call within Cisco to another employee. I don't use video much but I hope they've done as good of a job as they did with audio.

Lync is awful, it does some adaptive optimization that always seems to kill audio quality. VoIP at work (At least with Cisco) is usually some grumpy telecom guy disabling HD audio or the company skimping on telephones.

It's not that he's grumpy. It's that almost all phone calls terminate to or originate from the traditional Publicly Switched Telephone Network, which does not support HD audio and—for long-established historical reasons unlikely to change—uses a 3.1 KHz bearer frequency response range.

If they disable HD audio on pure-IP extension-to-extension/intra-company calling, that's stupid, though, and indeed could be done only by Mr. Grumpy.

There is unfortunately a trend to skimp on desk phones, but I think it's out of the perception that most users don't really care or use them that much.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#103

Post by notatoad »

n00b101 wrote: post #92

Counting number of options I might have when trying to do a video/voice call with someone: 1. Facetime 2. Skype 3. Hangouts 4. GoToMeeting 5. Slack 6. Facebook 7. WhatsApp The fragmentation / lack of standards we had with IM is now a reality in video/voice calling as well.

fragmentation carries some negative connotation, but in this context it's a great simple way to maintain some division between your communities. my skype account gets given out to customers and various random people i need to connect to at work. video calls with co-workers happen using hangouts. whatsapp is for family.

i don't really want to merge all of those contact pools into a single app.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#104

Post by abalashov »

sturmeh wrote: post #88
jamestenglish wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow quick to the low effort Slack is just IRC comment. In my opinion Slack does something that is often very undervalues and easily overlooked, it is like the opposite of a death my a thousand cuts - superiority by a thousand minor improvements. When taken individually or even in handfuls none of the features are that impressive, but cumulatively it creates a much better product. This was very apparent to me at least…

In my opinion IRC is superior to Slack, so I really don't understand this argument. (You're assuming Slack is an improvement on IRC, when in fact it's a completely different platform.)

Then I'm sure you can appreciate the irony that I use Slack via:

https://github.com/rawdigits/wee-slack

It's more featureful than the native Slack IRC gateway.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#105

Post by vortico »

aluminussoma wrote: post #14

Has anyone else noticed how pristine the audio quality of a Slack call sounds? I wonder how they optimized it. My company's voip, and Lync, and Skype all fail to deliver the same kind of call quality. I've only noticed / admired better call quality when making a call within Cisco to another employee. I don't use video much but I hope they've done as good of a job as they did with audio.

Since high quality, near-lossless 48kHz mono audio can be encoded at about 96kbps, which is much lower than most users' upload/download bandwidth, why do providers even think about going under this bitrate? For example, Skype is ~30kbps and frequently sounds overly-bandlimited and garbled, so why doesn't their algorithm just use only three times this amount? Is it an issue with latency, or just keeping down their server costs?

I legitimately want to know why, I'm not ranting.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#106

Post by stephenr »

notatoad wrote: post #103
n00b101 wrote: post #92

Counting number of options I might have when trying to do a video/voice call with someone: 1. Facetime 2. Skype 3. Hangouts 4. GoToMeeting 5. Slack 6. Facebook 7. WhatsApp The fragmentation / lack of standards we had with IM is now a reality in video/voice calling as well.

fragmentation carries some negative connotation, but in this context it's a great simple way to maintain some division between your communities. my skype account gets given out to customers and various random people i need to connect to at work. video calls with co-workers happen using hangouts. whatsapp is for family. i don't really want to merge all of those contact pools into a single app.

If we used standard/open IM/AV call protocols (lets say XMPP, and XMPP Jingle) you would just have two accounts, just like you have a personal and a work email address.

You can then choose to either:

- use a client that supports multiple accounts/profiles (either one at a time or multiple concurrent logins); or

- use two separate apps.

"I want to keep my private and work life separate" is not a good defence of fragmentation. By your logic, we should encourage every single email provider/software vendor/project to use their own subtly different protocol, and require the use of their own client software.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#107

Post by stephenr »

tonyplee wrote: post #93
n00b101 wrote: post #92

Counting number of options I might have when trying to do a video/voice call with someone: 1. Facetime 2. Skype 3. Hangouts 4. GoToMeeting 5. Slack 6. Facebook 7. WhatsApp The fragmentation / lack of standards we had with IM is now a reality in video/voice calling as well.

Also line, wechat and webex, iMessage. IMO, competitions, choices with communication SW are very good for all users. I like all the apps, options, free, ads, paid, webbase, mobile, etc. No need for unified standard.

The standard being referenced in the comment you replied to is about a standard protocol, not a single "standard" app.

Think the web/browsers.

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#108

Post by edhelas »

One small question here. With their "Instant emoji reactions" looks like they are doing server side shape recognition, so Slack video-calls are not P2P (i.e. if I'm calling my colleague in my office the streams are going to the Slack servers before going back)?

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#109

Post by mackwerk »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #53

We constantly have problems with Slack audio calls, they seem not to be stable even over very stable internet and wifi. I wonder if being in Europe is a factor

We don't have problems with Slack calls, we're based in Copenhagen, Denmark and I frequently have full-day sessions with a colleague in Spain

Re: Slack Calls: Now with video

#110

Post by opayen »

edhelas wrote: post #108

One small question here. With their "Instant emoji reactions" looks like they are doing server side shape recognition, so Slack video-calls are not P2P (i.e. if I'm calling my colleague in my office the streams are going to the Slack servers before going back)?

As I understood, this part with printing emoji was just a joke :)

What they are saying is that you can use regular emoji reactions while a video call.

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