[HN Gopher] Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio me...
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Google Meet rolls out multi-device adaptive audio merging
Author : tfsh
Score : 582 points
Date : 2024-05-26 15:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (workspaceupdates.googleblog.com)
| bagels wrote:
| I'm more interested in cancelling regular feedback from one
| laptop in the meeting.
| e_carra wrote:
| Not sure if this would solve your problem, but have you tried
| companion mode?
| bagels wrote:
| I think the other party would need to try it? I'm using a
| headset, the feedback is coming from the other party.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| The problem is the other half of the company that never use
| it.
| parpfish wrote:
| Do you mean audio feedback, or just one user that complains a
| lot?
| bagels wrote:
| I'm talking about when I hear my own voice. It happens when
| the person I am talking to is using speakers and a
| microphone, and my voice is picked up by their speakers and
| transmitted back to me. I didn't know this was controversial.
| crazygringo wrote:
| FYI, that's echo, not feedback.
|
| It can happen on any service and it means the echo
| cancellation on their end got confused -- it's an adaptive
| algorithm but occasionally adapts wrong.
|
| Best way to fix it is to mute yourself for ~5 seconds and
| then unmute, which should reset their echo cancellation
| algorithm.
|
| If that doesn't fix it, then have both of you pause and not
| talk for ~5 seconds. This should absolutely reset it, as
| the echo cancellation algorithm has now definitively
| learned what silence is supposed to sound like.
| foreigner wrote:
| Do any of the video call services support full duplex audio? It
| feels so stifling to have to be perfectly silent while others are
| speaking, compared to the give and take of a normal conversation.
| stavros wrote:
| Yes, all of them. Wear headphones.
| Groxx wrote:
| To +1 this, yes, every single one AFAIK.
|
| What you're running into is almost certainly noise
| cancelling. It's turning off your incoming audio so it
| doesn't intrude on your microphone picking up your voice.
|
| Disabling or tweaking noise cancelling or audio modes (i.e.
| to "headset") on _basically_ every meeting software will
| eventually get you a combination that doesn 't do this. It's
| sometimes a bit hidden though, and many have chosen to just
| say "everyone gets maximum noise cancelling" rather than
| trying to guess based on your audio device(s) so it doesn't
| always do it automatically or obviously.
| stavros wrote:
| Minor correction: it's echo cancelation, not noise
| canceling.
| leghifla wrote:
| +1 And usually, the one person in the meeting not using
| headphones does not feel the problem: he can speak all the
| time and be heard correctly, while the others cannot
| interrupt him while he is speaking
| stavros wrote:
| It's the other way around, the person who has no headphones
| cannot be heard while anyone else speaks.
| simonbarker87 wrote:
| I feel like Zoom does the best job of the corporate offerings.
| Google Meet feels like the worst and most stifling.
|
| I was talking to someone who specialises in corporate
| communication at a conference last week and she confirmed my
| feeling above as well. Her thing is "talking over each other is
| a key part of human interaction and forcing one at a time is
| stifling and unnatural"
| haiku2077 wrote:
| I just don't understand how this can work perfectly in
| Discord while working so badly in Zoom.
| jerlam wrote:
| They seem to be designed differently. The business ones try
| to replicate a business meeting where someone talks at the
| front of the room, shows slides, and prompts for questions.
| Discord is more like a LAN party.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| Might be also related to the delay in communications. There's
| the time the packets traverse the networks, but also delays
| due to buffering to accommodate poor connections.
| toast0 wrote:
| Total audio delay is from record buffering, sampling
| (typically 20 ms samples), encoding, packetization (1-5
| samples per packet), time in transit, decode, jitter
| buffer, playout buffer.
|
| You _could_ reduce sample size, and send fewer samples per
| packet to reduce total delay, but overhead goes way up
| (overhead is near 50% at 20ms samples, one per packet). In
| theory, you should be able to do something nice for people
| doing audio and video by including audio on the video
| packets, but it 's not simple, so I think most conferences
| don't do it.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Pretty sure literally all of them do, but generally only full
| _duplex_.
|
| Not triplex or quadruplex etc.
|
| In other words, if you're having a 1-1 video call, both of you
| have your audio working at all times.
|
| But as you go to 3, 4, 5, 10, 20 participants, it generally
| continues to be just max 2 simultaneous audio streams,
| determined by whoever has been the loudest recently.
|
| Unless you turn on special features like music mode etc.
|
| This is a feature, not a bug, because otherwise background
| noise and sounds would start adding up to become intolerable.
| (Why we usually try to intentionally stay on mute anyways, so
| we don't accidentally become even just that second audio
| stream.)
| toast0 wrote:
| Last N audio with N about 3 is pretty common. That might be
| you and three others, or three speakers including you. Beyond
| that isn't very common, because a) it's not very useful, and
| b) Google's WebRTC software (which is commonly embedded
| elsewhere) would only decode three audio streams anyway.
| yobid20 wrote:
| They changed that recently and removed the restriction that
| capped playing of 3 audio streams.
| nevir wrote:
| Meet, to me, is the perfect balance of functionality and
| simplicity (as an end user). And features like this only make
| that more apparent.
|
| Zoom and Teams always frustrate me, even though they're what I
| use far more often.
|
| It's too bad that video conferencing is largely a game of who has
| the most boxes checked - IT admins and A/V folk are the ones that
| need to be convinced, and Meet just doesn't ...meet... their
| needs
| stavros wrote:
| Meet frustrates me immensely because I can't just fullscreen
| someone sharing an HD screen onto my HD screen and get 1:1
| pixels with an overlay of faces (like Zoom does). Instead, I
| have to either not be able to read small text, or awkwardly pan
| in the recently-added "zoom" view.
| CitrusFruits wrote:
| Yeah I feel like with a couple UI tweaks or options Meet
| would be the best by far. It's just so much more convenient
| and accessible than the others.
| stavros wrote:
| I definitely agree, needs no installation, things just
| work, quality is good, has nice features like push-to-talk,
| etc.
|
| It's great, there are just some tiny UX niggles that could
| be solved very easily but haven't been, yet.
| matsemann wrote:
| It's horrible slow on some computers/browser combos,
| which is my main gripe with it. Video quality is also
| much worse, but doesn't matter too much to me. And as
| with all Google stuff the UX is kinda weird and non-
| intuitive. What does all the different join options do?
| When should I use what? Why must all presentations be so
| small if I also want to see the presenter? Zoom is much
| better here.
| mlrtime wrote:
| We are a meet company and I often have calls with
| vendors. I very much dislike when they send zoom links.
|
| It takes so much messing around with to actually get to
| the call, with meet it is one click every time.
|
| Install the fat client, no thank you. Connect computer to
| audio? Why is that even a question? Zoom is living in the
| 2000s.
| anon84873628 wrote:
| Just in case any Meet engineers are reading... It needs to
| let me put my self-view right under the webcam lens, so I
| can stare at myself and still be looking at the camera.
| sdenton4 wrote:
| I always turn off self view because it is incredibly
| distracting.
| blumomo wrote:
| You get near full screen watching a shared screen with Meets
| with these steps:
|
| 1. change Meets call layout to one video (presentation) only,
| disabling participant watching
|
| 2. press F11 to make browser go full screen
|
| 3. press Ctrl+Minus multiple times to decrease UI elements
| which makes the shared video near full screen
| stavros wrote:
| I'll try that, thanks!
| xiwenc wrote:
| That's a workaround at best
|
| I also think this is perhaps the top issue i have with
| Meets. The current UX does not consider the fact people
| share screen most of the time. having ability to go full
| screen to get 1 to 1 scale with some essential floating
| menus. Even more recent years when remote teams are the new
| normal.
| pimlottc wrote:
| It is pretty frustrated how limited the layout options are.
| The best workaround is to open a second Meet window and join
| the meeting in "companion mode" [0]. Then you can at least
| position the windows how you like, with each focusing on a
| different thing.
|
| 0: https://support.google.com/meet/answer/11295507?hl=en
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| I don't know how to do it with Teams either.
| shiandow wrote:
| Using Firefox you can use the PIP mode to put the
| presentation wherever you want at any size.
| stavros wrote:
| Oh, really? I didn't realize I could detach the
| presentation element, thanks!
| LiquidFlux wrote:
| I'm not a Meet user but Google have a PIP extension of
| their own for Chrome that might also work for the same
| purposes.
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/picture-in-
| picture-...
| wazoox wrote:
| In Firefox, click on the small "Picture in picture" button,
| then click on the "full-screen" corner button to make any of
| the videos full-screen. OK you don't have the faces overlay,
| but you'll have a nice full-screen version of the
| presentation.
| cloudwalking wrote:
| Agree, I find Meet is the simplest and works the best. I really
| appreciate the audio filtering -- don't ever hear colleague's
| typing or dogs barking or lawn mowing.
| novok wrote:
| Meet's GUI eats screen space and reduces the size of video
| feeds as a result with not being able to do anything about it.
| It took years for it to let you choose audio and video sources
| from the button itself like zoom has had forever and forced you
| to go into the setting panels and tap on 4 screens. Same with
| video feed layouts. I really dislike meet compared to zoom.
|
| Zoom also transmits much higher quality video and screen share
| feeds than meet does.
|
| This new feature is very impressive although, most echo
| cancellation is "mute everyone except one speaker" which leads
| to walkie-talkie style half-duplex talking, which really hurts
| normal communication flows. I wonder how they do it here.
| r00fus wrote:
| Meet's default audio noise cancellation is pathetic compared to
| Zoom. Initial Teams was also poor but has improved.
|
| My daughter's school uses Zoom for her IEP where at least one
| attendee is remote that day. Not a fun experience.
| nradov wrote:
| This isn't an area where simplicity wins. Zoom is targeted more
| towards professional use whereas Meet is more for casual or
| social use. It doesn't really support multiple displays, like I
| can't watch screen sharing on one display while moving the chat
| and video windows off to another display. Scaling options for
| screen sharing are inadequate and it doesn't even support real
| full screen display. Meet lacks advanced audio options that
| make it unusable for things like music lessons. Zoom has more
| third party integrations available.
| pquki4 wrote:
| I think because Meet is fully browser based, some of the
| features like sharing audio with screen are only available
| via chrome or chromium based browsers -- definitely not on
| Firefox in my own testing. I don't know the exact reason for
| that, but it's kind of sad.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Which is why I don't use Meet.
| kccqzy wrote:
| That's exactly the reason I use Meet. I don't want native
| code execution; I want sandboxed JavaScript code
| execution.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| That's fair. Everyone comes to these sorts of positions
| with a stack of values[1]. How that stack is ordered
| often determines one's choices.
|
| One of the interesting things for me from a technological
| perspective is whether or not we're converging on what
| the ideal set of features for a "video phone" would be.
| If there was a broad enough consensus on the core feature
| set I would hope an 'appliance' version would be
| available which would eliminate needing to use a general
| purpose processor (and all the risks that entails) for
| this sort of meeting.
|
| [1] From your response I infer that you value "no native
| code" and "sandboxed javascript" highly which guides you
| to the choice to use Meet, vs someone who might stack
| "User Experience" more highly than those two and end up
| at a different choice.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Yeah downloading an app for video calls feels very skype.
| And it's a non-starter for me personally given Zoom's
| history of lying about privacy and encryption.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| I use Firefox with Meet to screen share and talk all the
| time. Perhaps you mean it didn't use the GPU until
| recently.
| pquki4 wrote:
| I meant sharing audio from your computer, e.g. if you
| have a YouTube video playing.
| IshKebab wrote:
| I think more critically it doesn't support remote control. I
| have no idea how they have missed that critical feature. Do
| people really enjoy "now scroll down, no a bit more... back a
| bit... there! stop!"??
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| 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
| whstl wrote:
| 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?
| contrarian1234 wrote:
| 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
| whstl wrote:
| Ah, I can see how Google would do it like this.
| loosescrews wrote:
| This is only true for meetings created with free gmail
| accounts. If use Google Workspace this limitation does not
| apply.
| behnamoh wrote:
| That's a shady tactic right there.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| What's so shady about that? It's not like they're
| advertising a feature to free Gmail users only to up sell
| them to workspace?
| Guidii wrote:
| You can join a Google Meet meeting without a Google account
| if the meeting creator enables the "Anyone with the link can
| join" setting, or if they accept you when you click the link.
|
| https://support.google.com/meet/answer/9303069?hl=en&co=GENI.
| ..
| Szpadel wrote:
| I used many video conferencing systems over the years and I
| meet is my favourite
|
| usually there is need to some third party extension/application
| that have usually does not support Linux
|
| or if Linux is supported, they explicitly ban Wayland/pipewire
| (I'm looking at you slack)
|
| but for need they stick to web standards therefore this works
| in any web browser you might have
|
| also it tends to not consume every CPU cycle you have (slack
| again) so you can do so something while you eg screen sharing
| buro9 wrote:
| 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... but Gong is pretty expensive just to
| allow those who were out that week to catch up on a recording
| when they're back and if they care to.
| samcheng wrote:
| Hmm. We natively record and transcribe many meetings via
| Meet. Maybe it's a function of the plan we're on?
|
| I wouldn't want "autorecord" though - it's better for culture
| and rapport to not feel like every conversation is "on the
| record."
| buro9 wrote:
| Well I'd hope that's a property of a specific meeting and
| not all meetings, but team weeklies where those not present
| want to catch up, and the recording is only going to those
| regular attendees (members of a specific Google Group)...
| sure, that's a thing we would like to have.
| nicd wrote:
| Not sure what Gong's pricing is, but we evaluated a few
| different notetakers and settled on
| https://fireflies.ai/. $18 / month gets a recording and
| summary sent out to all invitees to the calendar invite,
| uploaded into Hubspot, etc. Very valuable for our sales
| calls.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| You might be surprised finding out that nearly all meetings
| are recorded by one or more participants for transcription,
| automatic notes, summaries and action points.
| adobrawy wrote:
| 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.
| prmoustache wrote:
| 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.
| walthamstow wrote:
| That's a great idea to record locally. Do you keep a deep
| history or wipe after 30/90/365 days? Do you need any
| special hardware for it?
|
| My memory is not great. I'm starting to have more calls
| with clients and it would be great to have a record
| rather than trying to take notes and conduct a
| conversation at the same time.
|
| > 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
|
| People generally don't like knowing that everything they
| say is being recorded
| prmoustache wrote:
| > That's a great idea to record locally. Do you keep a
| deep history or wipe after 30/90/365 days? Do you need
| any special hardware for it?
|
| If there is anything I want to keep, I will usually take
| notes but sometimes I cut the small part I need and store
| it in a special folder. I just wipe once in a while the
| main "obs" directory, every other week or so. if I
| haven't felt the need to play back a video, I doubt it
| will in the future so I don't keep a lot of retention, it
| is pretty much only to help me when I am getting
| distracted or multitasking during a meeting. Most of the
| time when I feel the need to play back the video, it is
| immediately after the meeting because I know something
| important had been said but wasn't 100% focused and want
| to be sure I haven't missed anything.
|
| But I don't have lots of meeting, a handful a week
| usually. I don't need special hardware, obs seems to be
| heavily multithreaded. It might hurt the battery usage if
| I am not plugged but no core is going very high in term
| of cpu and I don't feel any slowness. I am recording in
| the 2500/160kbps veryfast(medium CPU usage, standard
| quality) setting at 1080p, it takes like 1MB every 3
| seconds.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Recording meetings with OBS is pretty simple.
|
| The process is exactly like that of streaming a computer
| game along with local microphone audio, except one pushes
| the "Start Recording" button instead of the "Start
| Streaming" button inside of OBS. There's got to be a
| million (or more) howtos written on the subject.
|
| Hardware-wise, it's pretty straight forward: GPUs
| (including the ones that are a part of most non-Xeon
| Intel CPUs) have been up to the task of realtime video
| compression for around a decade or maybe more, which
| allows for the heavy lifting to be done in specialized
| silicon.
|
| A bigger concern than the technical practicality might be
| legal concerns that generally surround audio recording.
|
| For instance: In my state, I am permitted to record any
| conversation that I am a participant in -- I don't need
| permission from anyone but myself, and I don't need to
| notify anyone.
|
| But in the US alone, there's also 49 other states worth
| of laws on the subject, and they can vary quite a lot.
| alkonaut wrote:
| It very rarely matters which product is "better" in any
| objective sense. If you are team that work with Teams, your
| meetings will be on teams. Teams could be much worse than Zoom
| or Meet, you wouldn't move your group from Teams for one
| meeting anyway.
| sixothree wrote:
| We work with a lot of external customers. Teams, GotoMeeting,
| GotoWebinar, Skype, Google Meet, Zoom. And honestly, they all
| suck.
|
| Getting logged in is always a problem. Setting my name
| permanently is literally always a problem (I have zero idea
| why). Viewing someone elses screen always stinks because the
| scaling is just not good.
|
| On top of that you can't compare Teams to Google Meet because
| literally every organization has theirs configured
| differently. For some organizations, I can use my phone for
| audio. For others I can only use my laptop. So it's never an
| Apples to Apples comparison. Sometimes you have access to
| chat history; other times if you reconnect you lose chat
| history. The differences inside a product go on and on.
| Trekkie101-B wrote:
| I used to use a lot of random services while at work, and
| then I found Jitsi (browser based) and honestly I'm
| astounded it hasn't taken over because of its simplicity or
| ability to just handle anything thrown at it.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| In a big corp, when organising a meeting, we can choose
| between google meet, webex, slack (huddle) and zoom. I don't
| know why, but it is what it is.
| mulderc wrote:
| I have always had way more issues with meet than zoom. Guessing
| it is something about browser compatibility but participants
| regularly have issues with mics and cameras that I don't see
| with zoom.
| bongodongobob wrote:
| As an "IT admin", it's not that I need convincing. It's that
| the rest of Googles "office" products are absolute amateur hour
| and support is non-existent.
| jamesrr39 wrote:
| > the rest of Googles "office" products are absolute amateur
| hour
|
| Not quite sure about this. Gmail (both personal and company
| accounts) is IMO a great email client with loads of handy
| features, and I always felt Google
| Docs/Sheets/Slides/Drawings were well put together. Are they
| the best in class? I guess it depends what you are looking
| for. Could Drive be faster? Yes, that would be nice. But
| "amateur hour" sounds like we are simply using different
| products.
| fbdab103 wrote:
| Google Slides is Actually Hilarious
|
| HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30227588
|
| Article: https://medium.com/@laurajavier/google-slides-is-
| actually-hi...
| rayval wrote:
| I have used Microsoft Office for 20 years and Google
| Docs/Workspace for 15 years. I much prefer the Google suite
| over the Microsoft one. I prioritize quality of user
| experience, ease of use, performance, platform portability,
| freedom from constant intrusive software updates, and not
| messing with the built-in Emacs key bindings built into every
| Mac (Various MS Office programs inconsistently disable those
| key bindings). YMMV, esp with UI and UX, but for me there's
| no contest.
|
| Regarding support, that is not an issue I have never needed
| it for Google, but occasionally have needed for MS Office. So
| I can see why if you are using Office you would value that.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Has MS figured out searching emails yet? After 25+ years of
| outlook they never seem to figure out email search.
| dgellow wrote:
| My Meet calls always end up pixelated, where Zoom looks
| perfect. That's basically the only thing I care about after the
| audio quality, I often cannot read someone's screen when shared
| via Meet. Zoom also feels lower latency but I never checked if
| that's the case.
|
| Note sure if that's because I'm not in the US.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You might be hitting QOS limitations where traffic from
| Google is bundled with YouTube et al and served at a lower
| priority ?
|
| In my experience Zoom is always slightly better, but at a
| nitpicking level. I use meet day in day out, and fallback to
| whatever we have in hand if it's unworkable (pixelation would
| hit that line), and never saw zoom or Skype or discord being
| significantly better at these times.
| iruoy wrote:
| That would be against net neutrality laws here in The
| Netherlands, but we also get low bitrates when
| screensharing.
|
| But Google Meet is pretty good otherwise. Zoom is good too.
| All others I have used have been quite annoying to use.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Agree that Meet is the superior experience.
|
| Unfortunately, it's only a matter of time until one their VPs
| decides to "improve it" with the usual imbecile ideas they come
| up with.
|
| >Google Meet now scans all your files so they can get shared
| automatically with all members on the meeting when it is
| appropriate to enrich the conversation. You cannot opt-out this
| feature.
| varispeed wrote:
| The organisation I worked at used Meet until someone from
| Microsoft convinced them to use Teams.
|
| Such a nightmare. Quality of meetings went downhill and
| employees were penalised for secretly using Meet for ad hoc
| meetings.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| > employees were penalised for secretly using Meet for ad hoc
| meetings.
|
| Why would someone ever be secretly punished?
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Microsoft convinced the CIO that they can't meet regulatory
| requirements unless everything is recorded and under
| central compliance records management.
| kortilla wrote:
| Not secretly punished. Punished for secretly using a non-
| compliant tool.
|
| This is very common anywhere that handles sensitive info.
| sbrother wrote:
| I think we are technically supposed to use Zoom at my
| employer, but almost everyone (at least in eng) just uses
| Meet instead. The UX is so much better, and it's rarer that
| something isn't working with someone's setup.
|
| Also I swear the audio latency is worse with Zoom -- I find
| myself accidentally interrupting people more often.
| mulderc wrote:
| I have never received a meet invite from someone that isn't
| required to use it by their organization.
| make3 wrote:
| the free version has pretty low bitrate as far as I can tell
| pants2 wrote:
| With Meet, time from opening the meeting link to joining the
| meeting is often <1 sec, whereas others (especially Teams) have
| painfully slow loading screens.
| deathanatos wrote:
| Meet is nowhere near "<1 sec" for me, but my employer doesn't
| provide the best hardware, neither. It takes several seconds
| for the camera to initialize.
|
| Team's load time _is_ atrocious, though, by comparison.
| maccard wrote:
| I'm definitely closer to a second. It takes longer to load
| my calendar for the link than it does to load meet.
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Meet is perfect, I've always loved it. Slick and not bulky.
| Works beautifully in the browser. Simple features that work
| seamlessly. The ability to share single chrome tabs is a
| godsend. Zoom has always felt like a clunky product to me.
| echelon wrote:
| Meet and Google Docs are perfect Google products.
|
| I'm disapponted when people send me Zoom meetings or want to meet
| on Slack. Google Meet is a 10x better experience.
| lawik wrote:
| Unless you need legible screen dharing of a code editor in my
| experience. Zoom is awful in many ways but blows Meet out of
| the water for our needs.
| aniviacat wrote:
| Is it possible to use Google Meet without telling Google your
| phone number?
|
| I know that it's possible to use Zoom and Teams anonymously.
| But for Google Meet, I assume providing a (verified) phone
| number is required.
| rav wrote:
| You can use it with just a personal Google account - does
| that require a phone number? Alternatively, someone with a
| Google account can create a meeting (https://meet.new) and
| send you the link, which you can join without any Google
| account at all.
| worthless-trash wrote:
| I have never given my work my number, and yet meet seems to
| work for all my work meetings.
| parpfish wrote:
| I love meet because of how well it's integrated with google cal
| gomox wrote:
| There's a Zoom plugin for GCal that makes Zoom's integration
| identical to Meet, including mobile app integration.
| parpfish wrote:
| Good luck getting everyone in your company/org to
| successfully install an additional browser plugin
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| Docs has a few big shortcomings in my experience. Like it can't
| number headings and figures, and cross-reference to them.
| kevincox wrote:
| What do you mean cross-reference to them? You can link to any
| heading. Just place your cursor on the heading and the page
| URL will update. You can then link to that either from within
| the document or externally.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| You can't write "see Figure 2 in Section 1.2.3" and have
| those numbers update automatically. This is used everywhere
| in academia and technical reports.
| deathanatos wrote:
| The killer Slack feature is the ability to draw on the other
| end's screen. I _really_ wish I had that sometimes in (small)
| Google Meet meetings, simply to avoid the "it's on your left.
| Your other left. Okay down 3 items. That was four items. Go up
| one. No, now you've gone up 2 items..."
|
| Or mid-prod outage trying to get some engineer to type a
| command to run for you, and they can't dictate from speech to
| terminal, because they don't know shell/Unix commands _at all._
| Then I can just write the command on their screen, for them to
| copy character by character... (to some extent, chat solves
| this. To some extent. I also wish we could get some basic
| markdown.)
| eythian wrote:
| Zoom has this also. It's pretty handy once in a while.
| pcx wrote:
| Kudos to Meet team for supporting this! In the video conf world,
| where most problems are well solved, this is such an amazing
| feature to differentiate and be customer first!
| madisp wrote:
| Sadly this is feature-gated behind Gemini :/
|
| > Available for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini
| Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education
| Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on.
| trustno2 wrote:
| I'm not that deep into Google latest rebrand activity... how is
| Google Meet related to LLM model? or do they call many
| unrelated things Gemini?
| smt88 wrote:
| It's not related to Gemini. I suspect they're putting non-LLM
| stuff behind the Gemini paywall to make Gemini look more
| profitable than it is. Like most LLM rollouts, it could
| _maybe_ become cashflow-positive, but it will likely never be
| profitable because of the many billions it takes to compete
| with OpenAI and Meta.
| benterix wrote:
| > It's not related to Gemini. I suspect they're putting
| non-LLM stuff behind the Gemini paywall to make Gemini look
| more profitable than it is.
|
| I have yet to decide whether this is more ridiculous or
| sad.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| Bundling could also be a strategy to get people to try LLM
| products. You want X, you have to buy a package with both X
| and Y to get X. Many people will think, "I'm paying for Y,
| might as well try getting something out of it."
| notatoad wrote:
| google meet is part of their office suite, called google
| workspace. the higher tiers of google workspace include
| access to the paid tier of gemeni.
|
| also, in a previous iteration of google's AI branding, meet
| had a feature that would create llm-generated meeting notes
| for you. i'm unsure if this still exists
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/29/23849056/google-meet-
| ai-d...
| crazygringo wrote:
| Not if you pay attention to that last one:
|
| > _and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on_
|
| This might actually be using a decent amount of data center
| processing to handle the merged audio performantly.
|
| If that's the case, it could make sense that it belongs to a
| higher tier.
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| Do other platforms already provide something similar? While I've
| been picking up calls mostly in meeting / silent rooms (times of
| gathering around a jabra like a camping bonfire are fortunately
| gone for now) - some of the users of a platform that I've built
| (https://flat.social) would occasionally experience the atrocious
| feedback whistle while being in physical proximity.
| pachico wrote:
| Am I the only one surprised that they keep using this blog style
| as it was 2005?
| sexy_seedbox wrote:
| Blogger is basically abandonware.
| indymike wrote:
| I just exited my startup and now work for a much bigger company.
| I'm going from a Google-based productivity stack to a Microsoft
| one, and so far Teams is the worst and best change. Google Meet
| was fantastic for "just working" especially for less
| sophisticated meeting guests. The only time Meet didn't work is
| when corporate IT departments at customers actively blocked Meet
| so their minions used the "approved meeting solution".
|
| As far as Teams vs. Meet, it seems like Teams is great when you
| are working with people that have climbed it's learning curve.
| Teams is also filled with UX paths where it takes one or two
| extra clicks (and thoughts) to do simple things like share a
| file.
| benterix wrote:
| > As far as Teams vs. Meet, it seems like Teams is great when
| you are working with people that have climbed it's learning
| curve.
|
| Can you give one example?
| stackskipton wrote:
| 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 ends. In fact,
| depending on how you hold the meeting, it might dump the
| contents into chat channel so it's preserved in more open
| manner.
|
| 3) You can have visible meetings. You can start a meeting in
| a Teams chat channel so everyone can see the meeting is going
| on. It creates that in the office feeling of two people
| working on a whiteboard nearby that if topic interests you,
| you can join in.
|
| 4) Sharing Documents, Add Word Document to meeting, everyone
| is granted permissions. Done.
|
| The fact so many Google Workspaces companies have Slack is
| just frustrating. You have these two products that barely
| talk.
| risyachka wrote:
| > The fact so many Google Workspaces companies have Slack
| is just frustrating
|
| True, but Teams is so buggy and had in many areas has no UX
| per se.
|
| I'd take for 2 great products (Slack + Meet) with bad
| integration vs great integration of shitty products.
| uuddlrlrbaba wrote:
| Coming from a google meet org I consider the lack of "call
| someone" a killer feature
| sambazi wrote:
| unreachability is not a driving feature of communication
| infrastructure though
| mlrtime wrote:
| You've nailed a lot of the problems I see with slack+meet
|
| They do not integrate at all on these topics. Slack really
| could expand here (outside of huddles).
| mayneack wrote:
| Google meet has 4 now
| rav wrote:
| 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 to a laptop to continue the call).
| Too bad I'm not automatically Facebook friends with all my co-
| workers!
| Kwpolska wrote:
| You can convince your company to switch to Workplace, a
| corporate version of Facebook.
| sophiebits wrote:
| Bad news... https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/14/24156712/meta-
| workplace-f...
| pachico wrote:
| 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.
| benterix wrote:
| Rules are meant to be broken. I've participated in many
| meetings where, for one reason or another, some participants
| couldn't join in person. Making it easier - for them and for us
| - is a technical challenge, and not something to be decided by
| an arbitrary rule.
| djtango wrote:
| Remote is extreme and is still not the norm. It is easier to
| baseline on things optimised for remote then relax than try
| to shoehorn in person into remote which is then doomed to
| fail.
|
| I worked for a company that was headquartered in London and
| had satellite offices in Spain and Germany. After we all went
| remote during the pandemic the EU offices said they felt so
| much more engaged with the rest of the company because they
| were no longer disadvantaged by default for not being in HQ
| and in person bad habits were penalizing them
| unixhero wrote:
| It was for 2.5-3 entire years
| The_Colonel wrote:
| Personally, it was an eye-opener for me to see what
| difference the personal contact makes. I now prefer
| companies which are in-person or hybrid (which doesn't
| optimize for remote).
| pquki4 wrote:
| "doomed to fail"
|
| Its definitely doomed to fail if CEOs want you to _think_
| it 's doomed.
|
| Your comment is handwavy with words like "feel" and "bad
| habits". There are real issues with remote work, but there
| are also ways to mitigate the downsides of it. It's easier
| for some people to just dismiss the idea entirely and
| pretend that in-office work is the better alternative
| without any problems. I have definitely seen that happen in
| my company and here.
| djtango wrote:
| Yes - my response was to the rejection that rules are to
| be broken.
|
| I have worked there fully remote jobs and the ones that
| did it best fully leaned into being remote.
|
| There is no hard or fast rule, I've been in a team social
| where I was the only person remote and it still felt
| relatively natural. I've done a fully remote follow a
| recipe and cook at home session which was also pretty
| fun.
|
| I've also been in places that do the bare minimum of what
| constitutes remote "oh we use Zoom and screenshare" and
| dictate to people where everyone is cam off. And the
| difference is night and day.
|
| I think that a little bit of cargo culting wrt remote
| etiquette is probably a net good thing because I posit
| many people still don't know what good looks like.
| _joel wrote:
| "Remote is extreme". Have you seen how many jobs on the
| boards are remote?
| Rastonbury wrote:
| It gets complicated when half a team is in the office taking
| the same call from their desks, easier for Gitlab because they
| are full remote
| unixhero wrote:
| This does not complicate matters.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| It does in ways you likely don't understand. At large
| enterprises with satellite offices, most of us don't want
| to sit at our desks and annoy our coworkers who are also
| in-office by taking calls at our desks. That leaves meeting
| rooms, which are at a premium.
|
| Full single device for everyone would mean either everyone
| loudly shouting at their desks from within their noise
| canceling headphones or the company giving everyone an
| office with a door. As even Google doesn't do this for
| their employees, this is the next best thing we can do to
| save the sanity of our coworkers and respect remote
| colleagues dialing in by including them in a shared room
| meeting.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Perhaps headphones, cubicles, or offices per person could
| help?
| vultour wrote:
| I worked for a large company with offices all over the
| globe where 95% of meetings were online. I worked there
| for several years and don't remember anyone ever
| complaining about the setup, even though we were in an
| open office.
| kortilla wrote:
| Why is anyone shouting at their desk in this scenario?
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| I sometimes work out of a WeWork here in Bangalore, and
| they have these tiny one-person soundproof cubicles for
| taking calls. All they have inside is a cushioned bench
| to sit on and a table large enough to hold a 15" laptop.
|
| It's a great idea, IMO. You can fit 10-12 of these in the
| same space as a regular conference room. This solves
| exactly the problem you're describing.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| > You can fit 10-12 of these in the same space as a
| regular conference room. This solves exactly the problem
| you're describing.
|
| So it's kinda like sitting in a conference room, except
| you're talking to other people via a shitty audio quality
| with latency, random noise, talking over each other due
| to not seeing each other. You don't even have the benefit
| of a more ergonomic personal setup like more monitors.
| When people are in the office, let them do their meetings
| in person ...
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| If your entire team is in the same location, then you
| should certainly have your meetings in person. It'd be
| silly to force everyone to join a Meet/Zoom. I'm
| proposing a solution for situations when that's NOT the
| case (e.g everyone is fully remote or you have a hybrid
| team).
| The_Colonel wrote:
| When you have a hybrid team, the office people can sit in
| a conference room (for which this Meet feature will be
| great) and the remote people will connect remotely ...
| e12e wrote:
| Only if you don't have a reasonable amount of offices (one
| per person)...
| deathanatos wrote:
| ... 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 pandemic
| has meant a reduction in offices, so now we're ending up in
| "co-working" spaces, which -- despite this being the bread and
| butter of the business -- have in my experience alarmingly poor
| quality meeting rooms. To the extent that those present have
| given up on them. Literally, we were in one with no cabling. We
| asked the company for a cable, and they gave us a DP cable, but
| the room was HDMI. In these situations, yeah, nobody is going
| to want to waste the time trying to deal with getting the
| coworking space provider to deliver a quality product, and
| features like the one here help make up the difference.
| joelanman wrote:
| Each person would ask a question on their mic, they're not
| using one shared laptop
| The_Colonel wrote:
| It's optimizing for the lowest common denominator. When a
| majority of the team is present in office, it's silly to
| downgrade the experience for everyone.
| fredstar wrote:
| You are right, but sometimes hybrid is just a reality. For us
| it would be an absolute game changer when you do not have to
| rush to find an empty meeting room or phone booith.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Meet is nice, but could the screen sharing view just please take
| 100% height/width?
|
| I hate that I have to always manually tweak it through dev tools
| to make it usable.
|
| How many 400k TC engineers and misguided product managers does it
| take to make that change? FFS
| kccqzy wrote:
| It takes just one misguided product manager. It's easy at
| Google for one misguided product manager to derail a dozen
| engineers' work.
| DrammBA wrote:
| Are you using firefox? I use this extension called Stylus that
| lets you write custom css for pages and automatically apply it
| when you visit the page. There's probably something similar for
| chromium browsers
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Yeah but why do they make the UX so painful? Its their
| product, they should make it better for the people who use it
| every day. WHy make our lives worse lol wtf, its good
| software so I obviously like using it, and want this small
| change and I'm sure someone like Google can swing it
| dansimau wrote:
| I've always thought it would be nice if microphones can be merged
| when on a phone call with AirPods in. The mics in those
| headphones are really far away from my face and when it's windy
| talking on them is almost impossible. It would be nice to be able
| to just talk into the mic on my phone. Then the phone could boost
| my voice from multiple mics and filter out background noise.
| sMarsIntruder wrote:
| _Available for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini
| Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education
| Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on._
|
| So basically unaffordable for most organisations.
| opdahl wrote:
| This amazing news for my hybrid team. It has always been a
| struggle figuring out with laptop to use, moving around so you
| get closer to the mic etc. Hopefully it is as seamless as they
| portray it here in the blog.
| pquki4 wrote:
| My company has conference rooms that have specialized hardware
| for Microsoft Teams meetings. The audio really sucks -- everyone
| must project their voice for people joining online to hear. If
| someone speaks in a low voice, nothing can be heard on Teams even
| though it is clear enough for people in the room. I don't
| understand how we haven't solved this problem yet.
|
| The functionality here seems interesting, but I assume only works
| well if everyone or almost everyone brings a laptop. It probably
| won't work well for those situations where only one or two people
| take their laptops to an in-person meeting.
| andai wrote:
| Sounds imprrssive, but also overengineered? Don't headphones
| solve the same problem?
|
| Though I guess in a hybrid meeting they'd make it harder to hear
| the people in the room. (But you'd hear them through the laptop,
| normally? I guess there would be an uncanny delay...)
| mattlondon wrote:
| No because your voice is not constrained to headphones.
| Groxx wrote:
| No problem, just get everyone a Mutalk. Think of all the
| savings when you no longer need meeting rooms!
| deathanatos wrote:
| The most impressive thing about that is that the Mutalk 2
| _exists._
| okdood64 wrote:
| Who's wearing headphones in a meeting? Good luck trying to get
| people to do that.
| dewey wrote:
| I think you miss-understood the feature. It fixes the issue
| where there's multiple people in a room joining the same
| meeting from their laptops while sitting next to each other. It
| basically combines all microphones / speakers in that room into
| one big speaker / microphone just like a fancy conference
| setup.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > just like a fancy conference setup.
|
| Cool, so now I can get high fidelity audio of the guy in the
| corner surreptitiously trying to eat a bag of chips on Google
| Meet now too?
| dewey wrote:
| That sounds like a problem that you shouldn't solve with
| technology.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| All this monumental engineering effort from the comments at
| least, for people who can't be bothered to mute and unmute.
| sharts wrote:
| It took this many years to get echo cancellation implemented?
| Many other services had this like a decade ago.
| crazygringo wrote:
| No.
|
| Meet has had echo cancellation from the start.
|
| This is _multi-device_ adaptive audio _merging_ , as the title
| says. Completely different, and far far more impressive.
| dtx1 wrote:
| We use google meet internally where i work but i often have to
| work with external companies using teams, zoom and whatever else.
| Google Meet just works, all day, everyday for us (barring a
| fucked up client audio setup...) and this is such a sweet feature
| we've struggled with, I genuinely look forward to testing this
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| Another advantage of Meet that it is under U.S. control and law.
| Zoom out their development team in China. That country actively
| targets dissidents. It's easier when those controlling the
| software are easy for them to control.
|
| Better to use Meet than Zoom if the Chinese are in your threat
| profile or a larger threat.
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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 sync issues and phase
| issues and background noise issues... that's hard core.
|
| Kudos to the engineering team on this one. This is actually
| pretty amazing.
| iandanforth wrote:
| Do you think they are using some kind of inaudible-to-humans
| signal to coordinate this or is the unmodified audio good
| enough?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Unmodified audio is good enough, but using some signaling
| sound would improve coordination.
| dathery wrote:
| I could see this happening. Zoom for example already uses
| ultrasonic sound to detect what conference room a laptop is
| in for one-click screen sharing.
| YZF wrote:
| I wasn't aware audio hardware on laptops can emit
| ultrasound. Aren't those filtered to be below 22KHz?
| nomel wrote:
| 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...
| stavros wrote:
| 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.
| nomel wrote:
| > 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.
| ;)
| stavros wrote:
| I do use my phone to measure, though the mic might be
| filtered as well.
| lomase wrote:
| To sample a analog signal in digital you always have to
| filter it. Otherwise you would a lot of aliasing because
| of the Nyqst thing.
| hiimshort wrote:
| As someone who grew up with iPhones coming out around the
| time I was in middle school and apps producing noises
| like this were used as pranks in class I have to ask that
| people don't do this. The sound is painful.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yeah I'm pretty sure there are plenty of adults that
| _can_ hear those frequencies though. It 's not like
| everyone reaches 18 and suddenly loses hearing.
|
| Stupid devices IMO. When they first came out I downloaded
| a sample audio file from the manufacturers website to see
| if I could hear it. I couldn't.... because they encoded
| it as MP3 and it was completely filtered out by the
| encoding! Literally an empty file.
| ercan wrote:
| I used to hear the remote from TVs especially old Philips
| ones and LG's with the single chip on them. That was
| until I hit 44... after that is hit or miss or just
| imagining.
| thfuran wrote:
| But weren't old remotes all IR?
| cbracken wrote:
| Some very old remotes used what effectively amounted to
| high frequency tuning forks. Example:
| https://www.theverge.com/23810061/zenith-space-command-
| remot...
| ssl-3 wrote:
| No, not all were IR.
|
| But all of them made by "LG" and featuring a single-chip
| design are either IR or RF.
| Fanmade wrote:
| In our region, some people have devices to repel moles or
| marten using "Sounds that are inaudible for humans". I
| have yet to come near to one of these devices that I
| can't hear. And it's not only me, my wife can also hear
| them, as well as my daughter. I also know some people who
| can't hear anything from these devices, but it feels like
| the statistics about what people can hear and what not
| are not that up to date.
| dijit wrote:
| Agreed. My mother thinks I'm lying. I will admit I feel a
| little bit special that I can hear her motion activated
| cat-poop repeller thing.
|
| I visited her recently and wasn't sure if I had finally
| aged out of my sensitive ears (34 now) or if her
| batteries needed to be replaced.
|
| FWIW I wonder if people do not experience physical pain
| from certain sounds, because people seem to be totally
| fine with sirens but it feels like I'm having a spike
| pushed into the side of my head.
| ben_w wrote:
| When I was a teenager, the applause from the end of year
| school talent show caused me physical pain -- enough that
| the teachers noticed and got me out of the hall.
|
| This no longer seems to be the case, as I'm living right
| by a major junction and get random full volume sirens at
| least six times in the average day. I hate them, but they
| don't hurt.
| IsTom wrote:
| Personally I can't hear much above 15.5 kHz and I can
| hear these devices, so they're not even particularly
| high-pitched.
| rangestransform wrote:
| These are everywhere in Japan as anti loitering devices
| literallycancer wrote:
| Courtesy of anti social boomers. If I ever meet the
| person who approved the installation of this kind of
| system I swear I'll punch them in the face.
| andrekandre wrote:
| i wonder if that is what those super irritating high-
| pitched screeching noises near some buildings in
| shibuya...
|
| it seems to occur only late at night but could be
| wrong... i had assumed they were for driving rodents away
| but i guess not?
| jorvi wrote:
| Chromecasts do it too, for pairing purposes. I'm sure
| other devices use it for clever purposes as well.
| whoknowswho wrote:
| Teams does it too, I've had meetings where I've been able
| to audibly hear it coming from devices
| jeffrallen wrote:
| If you were doing this kind of multipath and array signal
| processing on RF signals, it would be covered by ITAR.
|
| And yet Google can ship it anywhere on the planet via HTTPS and
| webasm... Things that make you go hmm.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I have a _very_ strong feeling this is more marketing BS than
| 100% solved technical achievement. (disclaimer: xoogler, no
| inside info, just familiar with recent Google and separately,
| audio processing)
| joshuamorton wrote:
| It would be....surprising if this was done client side and
| not serverside.
| varispeed wrote:
| Also imagine that 44.1kHz on one laptop will not equal 44.1kHz
| on another or one can run at 96kHz and others on 44.1kHz etc.
| that means everything has to be dynamically resampled in
| realtime whilst preserving quality and low latency.
| nytesky wrote:
| Technically very impressive, and meets a real need. My office
| is still running telecom hardware from a decade ago, all the
| wireless mics have dead batteries, and is reluctant to replace
| since so many meetings are completely virtual, so why have
| custom in office hardware.
|
| This essentially replaces that expensive proprietary hardware
| with a matrix of laptops, and essentially every user gets a
| mic.
|
| But it only works on laptops right, not phones?
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| I too am in awe of the audio engineering challenges and
| opportunities here.
|
| But I don't necessarily know that Meet is trying to tackle all
| this? Are they using the mics as a microphone array &
| processing signals across phases? Could be missing it but I
| don't see that they said so. Perhaps they're just picking the
| loudest mic for a given speaker? Or any of a dozen other
| simpler tactics?
| whazor wrote:
| The current baseline is to manually mute and unmute
| microphones. So picking the best microphone sounds like a
| better idea already. If other people make a sound, I think it
| would be acceptable of that sound was missed/softened.
| warble wrote:
| I think this is much simpler than what you're suggesting.
| Careful microphone level management can handle this. No need
| for audio sync. I know they use the word "sync" but that's a
| very broad term.
| lomase wrote:
| You need sync to mitigate phase issues because the mics are
| in different positions on the room.
| jpc0 wrote:
| We were taught the 1:3 rule in audio...
|
| If the distance from the microphone to an "unwanted source"
| is three times the distance asthat from the microphone to
| the source phasing likely wont be an issue.
|
| There's always caveats with engineering but it's a decent
| rule of thumb assuming equal volume sources... I can
| imagine it's not too hard to detect that anyway, weve been
| able to do realtime fft for a very long time.
| warble wrote:
| No, probably not there are no phase issues if you just
| don't transmit the signal. The hard part would be to
| determine who's in the room, and then who's talking and
| then mixing appropriately to eliminate feedback and
| optimize speaker sound quality. None of which requires
| signal phase accurate synchronicity.
|
| If they're actually able to "sync" (again a poorly defined
| term) given the problems associated with network latency
| and different hardware it would border on magic.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| From the praise, I assume you have first hand experience with
| it ? Which part did you use and did you see any rough edges ?
| albertzeyer wrote:
| I assume it's just some neural network doing the heavy lifting,
| or not?
| mzl wrote:
| My guess is that that would introduce too much latency
| (neural networks generally have bad latency).
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| DLSS has to run in some small fraction of 16ms (as
| everything else still needs to run in that time) to keep
| 60fps- granted it's running on a GPU.
|
| But they can be quite fast.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if they were and audio is routed
| through a neural network before relay.
| weebull wrote:
| And in audio, that meets the definition of really bad
| latency.
| boffinAudio wrote:
| I agree that this is amazing - but what I don't like about it,
| is the fact that a 3rd party is doing this, when it should
| really be a built-in feature of the operating system - or at
| least, be implemented as _close to the device as possible_.
| From what I can glean from this breathless press release, this
| functionality requires a fair bit of cloud ... anathema to
| audio professionals, but maybe not so, the professional
| management classes.
|
| Too many times these kinds of services are wrapped up at the
| application layer, where really they belong in the operating
| system. For example, wouldn't this be a perfect thing to
| implement as a plugin for Pulseaudio, or JACK, or even .. VST?
|
| (Disclaimer: I work on high end microphone and audio products
| at a well-known hardware manufacturer of such, where much more
| effort is being made to make the devices, themselves, smarter
| ..)
| jpc0 wrote:
| How would you do this on the os?
|
| I would honestly try to sync audio output based on a shared
| time reference, something along the lines of what
| AES67/Ravenna/Dante does but you can be a little more lax and
| use ntp or system time since you don't need to be sample
| accurate.
|
| For the microphones that would be a little harder but you
| should be aware it's not that tough since a few high end
| manufacturers have phased microphone arrays for
| videoconferencing. You could probably get close though but
| the fact is you need the audio from all the sources in a
| single location for processing and do phase analysis on it
| and possibly find an optimal delay for each by checking the
| group delay.
|
| The advantage they have is some latency is acceptable and
| they don't need to do it on a low power device.
|
| I don't see what this has to do with Gemini but maybe that's
| just marketing...
| svnt wrote:
| My money is that outside of a couple of dog and pony demos
| with everyone on one well-administered LAN you could not
| make this work with system time and NTP on consumer
| devices. You will regularly see 100ms difference in NTP
| time.
|
| The fact that phased array microphones exist has nothing to
| do with the point we are discussing, which is audio
| coherence across heterogenous devices whose only real
| connection is a web browser.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| In a large room, perfect syncing is actually impossible since
| different listeners will be far enough from each other speakers
| to cause, at best, comb filtering, and at worst, audible
| delays.
| IsTom wrote:
| I assume that if speakers are not set too loud then either
| you're close and the algorithm works or you're far and sound
| is quiet enough that it's not an issue.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| If the speakers are not set too loud, you don't need the
| algorithm at all.
| IsTom wrote:
| If you're sitting next to each other with regular volume
| then clearly you do, with the same volume, but across a
| room it's probably going to be ok.
| krashidov wrote:
| The fact that you can't easily go full screen on Meets is
| bizarre. Makes it a non-starter for pairing. Also, the dedicated
| app's session lasts for like a day which makes it useless, so I'm
| stuck having to scroll through my 3 chrome windows and 40 tabs to
| see where my meets tab is. Although I'm sure the session timeout
| is some sort of gsuite configuration
| notatoad wrote:
| does this mean that when a new person joins a meeting that isn't
| on mute by default, we won't have to deal with the echos from
| everybody else in the office while they scramble to find the mute
| button?
|
| because that sounds _amazing_
| anotheryou wrote:
| Surround sound from the speakers next :)?
|
| I however think (emulated) stereo sound and low latency would do
| wonders. Sadly this feature here will only introduce latency.
|
| Feedback cancellation for external speakers would also be
| amazing, so you can get rid of your headphones at home. Close up
| mic and noise gate works, but is fiddly (and no easy noise gate
| and compressor on linux...)
| nh2 wrote:
| I want a simpler feature:
|
| Auto-detect people not using headphones, and prevent them from
| speaking. Until they put some one.
|
| Ideally showing them some customisable scolding message.
|
| So far, any feedback / echo cancellation I've encountered just
| makes everybody's life miserable. Degradation to non-duplex voice
| (because all except the loudest speaker are attenuated down),
| "seaside noise" effect", etc.
|
| This is the reason why a phone call over GSM or landline still
| often "feels" better than any HD video call with people on
| screens: Low-latency duplex audio.
|
| Most* of this goes away if you just wear headphones.
|
| Maybe this can be fixed by making the algorithm way more
| complicated, as the announced feature does. But I'd be surprised.
|
| [*]: "Most": 2 people with headphones sitting near each other
| still cause echoes for each other and other participants. Fixing
| that is truly novel, and needed even for headphone users.
| maliker wrote:
| And then there's another nag prompt if bluetooth headphones/mic
| are detected. The latency on those things can get horrendous,
| up to like 300 ms.
| nh2 wrote:
| Exactly!
|
| I was shocked to learn that the latency from laptop to ear is
| higher than to the other side of the planet.
|
| Most people don't notice the adverse psychological aspects of
| this:
|
| People get really annoyed by when constantly talking over
| each other. It subconciously makes you dread talking to the
| other person.
|
| When everybody is using wired headphones, you suddenly like
| your coworkers more!
| maliker wrote:
| And then there are apps/OSes that set the mic gain at like
| 5% of max, so everyone else has to put their volume at 95%.
|
| We should probably get off hacker news and just start
| building a teleconferencing app.
| btown wrote:
| Since it'd be twice as good as Meet, we could call it
| Duo! Oh wait...
| maliker wrote:
| More than twice as good it would "zoom" past the
| competition... shit.
| klausa wrote:
| This would have 90% of the employees revolting within hours
| of instituting; for a very good reason.
| deathanatos wrote:
| I guess I'm just not talking, then.
|
| This is the part where I mention how Bose, despite making a
| $300 headset, didn't put a pin/wire on the wired connection
| for the mic.
|
| (I usually use the laptop mic nonetheless, though, because
| for some reason if you want to record audio with bluetooth,
| the quality of the audio _output_ becomes potato.)
| mysteria wrote:
| The thing though is that it's entirely possible to have a setup
| with loud monitoring (e.g. performers on stage with floor
| wedges to hear the music and themselves) using speakers. It
| works well with directional dynamics and stage condensers close
| to your mouth, but fails horribly with the omni ECMs on your
| laptop/webcam several feet away.
|
| I love my WFH setup with a dynamic right in front of my mouth
| and have the system properly rung out so I can monitor myself
| with no feedback. The cartoid pattern greatly reduces the sound
| coming from the off-axis speakers and the noise gate takes care
| of the rest. Obviously this isn't for everyone though and good
| luck having something this in the office unless you have a room
| with a door.
| deepak_sozial wrote:
| Will this work on Google Workspace Business Starter plans?
| 7ewis wrote:
| I had the opportunity to try this last month, it worked really
| well!
| alberth wrote:
| If this works, I really hope it comes to both Teams & Zoom as
| well.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Maybe the next feature they can work on is allowing multiple
| people to speak simultaneously
| sirjaz wrote:
| But when will Google roll out a stand alone app for meet on
| Windows and MacOS? It couldn't be that hard and it would have
| better performance then running in the browser.
| tedd4u wrote:
| Don't they already have it? It's called Chrome.
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| What makes you think it'll have better performance if it was
| rewritten as a native app? All the underlying code that handles
| audio and network communication is already built using fast
| C++/Rust code. This includes things like WebRTC, audio and
| video capture, compression, the WebAudio API, etc.
|
| In products like Meet, JavaScript just acts as a glue language
| that sticks all these APIs together. All the heavy lifting is
| actually done by the browser, and modern browsers are some of
| the most efficient language runtimes humanity has ever built.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| deathanatos wrote:
| 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.
| noduerme wrote:
| 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.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| A bit off-topic but I'm going to take this opportunity to ask for
| help. In Zoom, I can share multiple screens/windows at once by
| CMD + Selecting multiple windows. How do I do that in Google
| Meet. I want to do a presentation and I want to show/share two
| separate screens/windows (not monitors) at once.
| ClassyJacket wrote:
| Google Meet? They made another one? I can't keep up. Is this a
| replacement for Hangouts? Allo? Duo? This is so confusing.
| eichin wrote:
| Literally another one: one of the things Google Meet
| replaces... is Google Meet (original) from 2017.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| > Available for Google Workspace customers with the Gemini
| Enterprise, Gemini Business, Gemini Education, Gemini Education
| Premium, and the AI Meetings and Messaging add-on.
|
| What does this mean?
| robbyiq999 wrote:
| What if the resulting audio output of the digitally converted
| human vocalization has an inaudible frequency modulation or
| signature added to it which operates in a range inaudible to the
| human ear, you could then detect said signal and filtered out its
| source or merged / manipulated
|
| Now fixing search, that would be truly mind blowing.
| danielbln wrote:
| What search? Some search within Meets? Or are you talking about
| Google Search in general, in which case I don't think the Meets
| team has much to do with that.
| Dockson wrote:
| I'm surprised no one here has mentioned around.co yet. They've
| had this feature for years which was the main reason our team has
| been using it. Good to see other services catching up.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| I've thought about why you couldn't do this forever! Amazing
| technology but I always thought multiple audio input should be
| able to make a room a better source not worse and full of
| feedback.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Fantastic idea. This is the first actually useful (as in "step
| change useful", not just "here's another way of browsing your cat
| photos") feature I've seen from Google in years.
| gcr wrote:
| If this works externally anywhere close to as well as it worked
| internally, this is going to be incredibly cool.
| heeton wrote:
| Question: hasn't around.co been doing this for years?
|
| I remember using that tool in 2022 or so, multiple people in a
| room with this kind of audio sync / cancellation.
| hugocbp wrote:
| Amazing!
|
| I don't trust Google with barely anything these days anymore
| (except Gmail just because it has been so long, and Maps), but
| Google Meet is the one thing that I prefer Google's solution over
| anyone else's.
|
| Meet is just so much better than Zoom, Teams, FaceTime, WhatsApp
| Video, etc.
|
| I'm so glad they are tackling this specific issue. Pretty amazing
| feat if it works well.
| azangru wrote:
| > Meet is just so much better than Zoom, Teams, FaceTime,
| WhatsApp Video, etc.
|
| So much better? Does Meet have instruments for whiteboarding or
| on-screen annotation?
| mepiethree wrote:
| Yes it does. Whiteboarding requires a free add-on (e.g.
| FigJam, Miro) but you can add that in-call
| user3939382 wrote:
| I want to be able to customize a route in desktop Google Maps and
| send it to my phone.
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