Audio processing is a risky move -- so hard to get right. We've been using https://team.video at work, and one thing I absolutely love about it is how they handle audio / muting.
When you're speaking, you don't have to wonder if others can hear you because your microphone pulses in green visually as you speak. If your audio isn't working it shows in yellow with no pulsing, and you and everyone else can see your audio is not flowing.
Also, if someone else forgot to mute and their kid is making a ruckus, you can just mute them. You don't have to wait for a moment to interject and ask them verbally, you can just go ahead and do it.
Or, when you see someone else in their video feed trying to speak up, but they forgot to unmute, you just unmute them. No everyone saying, "you're muted" over each other.
It takes a second to get used to the idea that everyone has all the power, but in practice it just makes everything go way smoother.
It's only scary in the same way that it's scary how anyone walking down the street could kick you in the pants when you're walking down the street.
They could but they won't because we live in a society. Which is great because that means we don't have to walk around in steel suits to avoid getting kicked in the pants.
I choose to trust the people I work with every day. And then as a bonus, I don't have to hear people yelling "you're muted!" at one another. We just get on with it.
No. If you mute yourself you are distancing yourself from a conversation. Unmuting someone is like following them secretly on the street into their house and listening in on them standing behind their curtain. It is creepy and wrong and shouldn't be possible. Maybe they are having a fight with their spouse? You shouldn't be able to listen in on someone who muted themselves without them aknowledging it
The only legitimate use case I see for this is if you are working with e.g. elderly people who have a hard time understanding the whole thing and even then it shouldn't be possible without them clicking on "Yes" explicitly.
The difference there is that kicking people on the street lands you in jail (likely not the first time, but if you do it repeatedly...), and remote unmuting would likely require wiretap laws in unconvenctional ways to even get a judgment of whether it's illegal or not (not even considering what it brings with it).
Also, you're implying that one would only use this technology to communicate with people you work with every day. What about a meeting with outsiders/contractors/customers? You might not actually have those yourself, but someone usually has to do those.
I know we're getting far from the original point here, but I'm going to seize this opportunity anyway: the so-called "thin blue line" is not the reason society is able to function. We work as a collective /despite/ the presence of police and the prison industrial complex, not /because/ of them.
Exactly. In the case of a video call with your colleagues, everyone collectively manages mute states so that the group can be more productive.
Then, if one asshole starts unmuting maliciously, they get shunned real quick and then fired if they keep it up. We don't need to limit ourselves with draconian measures when social norms and expectations will already suffice.
This is why I was so opposed to Zoom when my company started adopting it a few years ago: the room dictator or whatever it's called can unmute you. (Maybe only if they had muted you in the first place.)
When you're speaking, you don't have to wonder if others can hear you because your microphone pulses in green visually as you speak. If your audio isn't working it shows in yellow with no pulsing, and you and everyone else can see your audio is not flowing.
Also, if someone else forgot to mute and their kid is making a ruckus, you can just mute them. You don't have to wait for a moment to interject and ask them verbally, you can just go ahead and do it.
Or, when you see someone else in their video feed trying to speak up, but they forgot to unmute, you just unmute them. No everyone saying, "you're muted" over each other.
It takes a second to get used to the idea that everyone has all the power, but in practice it just makes everything go way smoother.