Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
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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
#2Happy 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.)
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#3The 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.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#4The 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 can vouch for this. I haven’t really needed the background blur feature personally, but I’ve tried it and both myself, colleagues, and friends — pretty much everyone I’ve talked to that has used it — loathe Google Meet’s background blur, and prefer Zoom’s by far.
In my experience, it doesn’t completely cover the background most of the time, and if you move at all, as you point out, it can’t keep up.
Kind of funny to see Google engineering blogging about it when it feels extremely half baked.
This makes me sad, because in all other areas, I think Meet excels well beyond the competition.
EDIT: removed my general sentiment on Google
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#5Happy 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 at this point, except that everyone wants to use it.
In maybe a decade, it might be found in standard libraries of programming languages and on top of things like `Math.abs`, we will have `ML.textToSpeech("Hello world")`, or `ML.isCat(image)`, etc. However, the problem I see with that is that no matter how far we wind the clock forward, we will only be able to put the most simplistic use cases into a library. `ML.isCat()` could be one of those, since most humans will be able to image categorization, it stands to reason that you could put this into a library. However, most industry application involved highly customized ML algorithms that are optimized for a very specific use-case. So there will always be a need for a research team in big companies at least. Maybe smaller companies will try to build their stuff by chaining libraries together.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#6Happy 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.)
AI is learning existing patterns from input/outputs.
Programming is setting up patterns to turn your inputs into desired outputs. Most often it's just plumbing data around with some transformations.
What you're talking about is using AI as programming tools. It's still programming, but using pre-trained models as part of the plumbing.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#7Wtf happened to hangouts? How many video products does google have?
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#8The 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 can vouch for this. I haven’t really needed the background blur feature personally, but I’ve tried it and both myself, colleagues, and friends — pretty much everyone I’ve talked to that has used it — loathe Google Meet’s background blur, and prefer Zoom’s by far. In my experience, it doesn’t completely cover the background most of the time, and if you move at all, as you point out, it can’t keep up. Kind of funny t…
"Turns out our training set was comprised entirely of backdrops from Google HQ. Sorry everyone else!"
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#9The 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.
At least for background blur the latency there is enough to make it almost unusable: easily over 100ms. This is with latest stable Chrome on a relatively recent Ryzen/Nvidia system. Maybe background replacement will do better once it rolls down to regular Google Meet (too lazy to log into my Google Apps Suite Workspace) :-) However, everything else about Google Meet is great and I wish I could make all my Zoom friends switch.
Re: Background Features in Google Meet, Powered by Web ML
#10Wtf happened to hangouts? How many video products does google have?
Meet is business oriented and offers features that Hangouts does not, e.g. dialing in via phone. It also requires a G Suite account (or did before COVID, IIRC).