Next-gen video calls
'Another video-conferencing application?!' the majority of you would probably say. Calm down, guys, you are right, as this application has just started to gain popularity.
Which inconvenience do you meet using Zoom, Skype and other similar popular applications? When you are interacting with colleagues during calls in some tools, like Google Doc, Miro, whatever, you can’t see them or you have to often switch between those applications.
This application now has probably only one distinctive and breakthrough feature which is to show faces of your colleagues over the window where you are interacting. That’s enough for me to call it next-generation video-conferencing application: AI-based camera framing cuts off the faces of the colleagues from their surroundings and follows their head’s movements to show you. You can scale faces, arrange them and put them on your screen in whatever place you want.
I had the meeting with a Product Manager at Around.co last week and got answers to some questions (see below).
Current features:
- Floating mode (of the whole array) and Campfire are two convenient arrangements of the faces;
- Noise cancellation: their AI-based auto-mute recognizes common noizes of surrounding and suppresses them, giving priority to human voice;
- Notes: shared interactive space for making notes, which are sent to all participants after the call;
- Drag and dropping: you can exchange the files just simply throwing them onto the face of a participant;
- Reactions or Write a thought: signs which will appear next to your face;
- Hotkeys: Reactions, Actions - practically everything have hot keys;
Noticed inconveniences:
- There is no ability to record the meeting yet;
- There are no artificial backgrounds or blurring surrounding, but some magic feature was promised to be delivered very soon;
- No “pin/unpin” option which makes application be always above all the others even when their windows are enrolled in a full mode;
- You can't separate faces from single array and move them freely or to sort out participants for some reasons and put them into the different places on the screen;
- There is no chat, you have to send messages in application like Slack, from which you are just initiating a video call;
So as I have said in the beginning, the application is very fresh and young, but it promises and delivers its main feature - to show participants of the call above other windows. I truly believe they have many distinctive features in their backlog, so that application might be called as the tool for the high-impact video calls of a new era.
You can request and get invitation on their website https://www.around.co/ By the way, you will get 3 invitations to share, and each of those invited will obtain their own 3 invitations;)