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Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

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Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#41

Post by captn3m0 »

askvictor wrote: post #38
neilpanchal wrote: post #32

Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn. Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.

More important than the button is the status indicator - I need to know if the call is muted or not. Even better, promote it to an OS-level icon/badge/overlay. If my mic is actively in use, please make it blindingly obvious.

The color indicator for mic on/off is terribly for Meet.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#42

Post by virgilp »

sltEvas wrote: post #5
sillysaurusx wrote: post #2

Happy 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…

There's never going to be a `ML.isCat(image)`, just like there isn't a `Math.solveProblem(hypothesis)`. Yes you do have `Math.abs` and you're going to have stuff `model.fit()` and `layers.dense()` - but something like `ML.isCat` is too specific to be used in a library

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#43

Post by helpfulgoogler »

neilpanchal wrote: post #32

Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn. Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.

Not what you asked for, but you can mute/unmute quickly with the keyboard shortcut: ⌘/Ctrl + d

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#44

Post by systemvoltage »

neilpanchal wrote: post #32

Aside: Imagine you’re driving down the road and you need to make a right turn. Well, for some reason the steering wheel is stowed away and disappeared! You need to hover your hand around the center console in a specific area to be able to expose it. Out comes the steering wheel and now you can make a right turn. Google UX/UI team: Please fucking make the mute/unmute button visible at all times.

Isn't this sort of a Fizz Buzz for a UX/UI design professional? I don't mean to demean anyone, but I see this sort of a thing literally everywhere. Hiding important and absolutely crucial information (that can make or break your product) in the name of minimalism. Coming out of a company that has one of the highest hiring bars for software engineering, and yet, their products have such an awful UX/UI. This isn't an exception, it is a pattern.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#45

Post by sillysaurusx »

virgilp wrote: post #42
sltEvas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's never going to be a `ML.isCat(image)`, just like there isn't a `Math.solveProblem(hypothesis)`. Yes you do have `Math.abs` and you're going to have stuff `model.fit()` and `layers.dense()` - but something like `ML.isCat` is too specific to be used in a library

Disagree. In the future, that'll be `npm install ml-cat` followed by `MLCat = require('ml-cat'); MLCat.isCat(image)`

It might not be npm, but something like that is probably inevitable.

The reason it seems so unlikely is because the tooling isn't there yet. No one even agrees how ML code should look, let alone how libs should be distributed to end users. But I saw the transformation for JS in 2008.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#46

Post by csande17 »

virgilp wrote: post #42
sltEvas wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's never going to be a `ML.isCat(image)`, just like there isn't a `Math.solveProblem(hypothesis)`. Yes you do have `Math.abs` and you're going to have stuff `model.fit()` and `layers.dense()` - but something like `ML.isCat` is too specific to be used in a library

Apple begs to differ: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/vision/vnanimalide...

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#48

Post by loosescrews »

deelowe wrote: post #33
riffraff wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, everything else about Google Meet is great and I wish I could make all my Zoom friends switch. is it _better_ than zoom tho? I my experience, I don't see much of an improvement worth switching.

Try using meet, teams and zoom on high latency and/or low bandwidth connections.

Meet seems to work better on poor connections, but it does it with a significantly more CPU intensive codec (VP9?). As a result, it only seems to work well if you have a powerful CPU. If you have a weak CPU, Zoom seems to work much better.

Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML

#49

Post by dharma1 »

jmarcher wrote: post #28
dharma1 wrote: post #15

Sony 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 optic…

Canon and Nikon do too. In practice, the quality bump is nice, but we are still talking of a fairly low res/bit rate when it gets through Zoom so the end result is fairly underwhelming. As far as what the other people see on their wnd.

Yeah.. both Zoom and Google Meet have >720p video but the bitrate especially on Zoom is a travesty, 600kbps/1.2mbps stream with all the different resolutions in the same stream.

The codec situation with h264/HEVC/vp9/AV1 software/hardware encoding is a mess. Hopefully we'll get wide hardware support for AV1, although it might take a while.

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