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Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging

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191–200 of 279 posts

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

#191
post #25

Meet is nice and nicer than Teams and Zoom in my opinion, but for 1-on-1 pair programming I think Facebook Messenger actually has the best experience - when you're on the same screen resolution, the screen sharing is 100% zoom (unlike Meet which has padding around the edges), and you can move seamlessly between mobile and desktop (i.e. answer a video call on mobile, the other party sets up screen sharing, and you go…

You can convince your company to switch to Workplace, a corporate version of Facebook.

Bad news… https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156712/meta-workplace-f...

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

#192
post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most adults can’t hear > 18kHz. Related, there are devices you can buy to repel teenagers: https://www.today.com/news/controversial-mosquito-sonic-devi...

I can hear whatever my PC can output, but I can't hear anything in our Zoom meeting rooms. Maybe it's low volume, though.

> I can hear whatever my PC can output

This would require measuring equipment, since you can also only hear what you PC can output that you can hear. ;)

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

#193
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can hear whatever my PC can output, but I can't hear anything in our Zoom meeting rooms. Maybe it's low volume, though.

> I can hear whatever my PC can output This would require measuring equipment, since you can also only hear what you PC can output that you can hear. ;)

I do use my phone to measure, though the mic might be filtered as well.

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

#194

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 assume it's just some neural network doing the heavy lifting, or not?

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

#195

Odd. Today I was on a Meet with my girlfriend and her audio kept dropping to silence when she would put the phone down and walk around the kitchen. If she spoke loudly enough it would cut back in. As if it was waiting to recognize voice versus ambient noise. We use Meet a lot, and I'd never noticed that happening before and wondered if it was due to some setting.

I think in most VC software (including Meet) there is a threshold you have to be above, or it's considered just background noise, and not transmitted. In Discord, you can actually view your audio in reference to the threshold, which helps get that setting set appropriately for the hardware you have. No such luck for the "real" VC apps though.

I've done a fair amount of audio engineering, and my perception today of Meet was that it wasn't the simple threshold / noise gate that I would expect. For instance, I could see her moving her lips and putting down dishes, which I'm sure were noisy, but until she spoke loudly enough for a recognizable voice to overcome the dish sounds, she was essentially muted by the app. I think it was being gated based on vocal range or actual identifiable speech, not just volume. That was what seemed new to me.

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

#196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can give several. Most of them are not Meet specific but how Meets integrates with rest of Google Products. This is actually overall massive problem with Google Workspaces in general IMO. 1) You can call someone in Teams. Sure, Google Chat has "Start Meeting now" but it's very passive. I know some will see this as negative but ringing has massive advantages around UX. 2) Chat, Teams will persist chat after meeting…

Coming from a google meet org I consider the lack of "call someone" a killer feature

unreachability is not a driving feature of communication infrastructure though

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

#197
post #26

GitLab offers a nice course about transitioning to remote work. One of the items in their guidelines about online meeting is not having hybrid meetings. This is, all those attending must attend from their own device rather than the meeting room one (see Jabra) precisely for the reasons this feature tries to address.

… no? No! That's terrible advice. The meeting room (should) have a much higher quality mic than an attendee's laptop. You want that mic. Worse, when attendees use their mic, someone in the room asks a question, which remote viewers cannot/do not hear, because it is not picked up by the mic on the laptop. Or they join and don't mute, resulting in feedback loops. I do feel the need for Google's feature though: the pand…

Each person would ask a question on their mic, they're not using one shared laptop

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

#199
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meet requires a Google account to attend a video call while Zoom does not. So if your hosting a meeting with strangers, using Meet is not user friendly. At least personally I refuse to make a Google account bc it requires giving Google my phone number... But I know that's a bit of technoludditism in the current zeitgeist

Is this new? I have definitely joined Meets calls from my personal laptop and I don't have a personal Google account. This includes my last job interview, and, well, I got the job. Perhaps it's meeting specific, or organization specific?

I read that if you have a business account then this limitation doesn't exist - but I've never had anyone send me a link that worked without a login

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

#200
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..…

Meeting recordings are available in Google Apps Script. Autosharing can be easily solved by simple Google Apps Script. I scan my personal calendar and share recording to Slack channel when I detect group meeting with recording available. Mail me, so I can arrange something for you. Autorecording - yeah, this is missing. There is paid Chrome Extension which do that, but I have never tested it.

I record all meetings locally regardless of the tool with OBS. But that is only useful to me as I don't ask for authorization and not sharing them. It is only because I know my mind will sometimes drift and I want to be able to replay part of the meeting.

Having said that, so many people don't record meeting I or someone else can't attend. This is annoying. It should be automatized so that if you miss part or all of a meeting you can still watch the record as long as you were invited.

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