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Comment by airstrike | Hacker News Reader

Zoom IMHO has nailed the workflow for clicking an autodial link on my phone, joining the call by video on my laptop and having the participant pin appear on the screen quick enough that I can type it right as the automated voice prompt asks for it on the phone

When you're hopping from one call to the other, having the ability to quickly drop and join the next one [EDIT: with audio from my phone] is a big win

That, the global Alt+A / Alt+V for the audio / video mute toggle respectively, and the "hold spacebar to talk" hotkeys make it the clear winner from an UX perspective IMHO, even if that X isn't really perfect

At the end of the day, most calls are virtually lag free so I care more about my ability to efficiently interface with the app than I do about a perceived streaming quality [EDIT: except, of course, for those participants who don't join the audio via their phone, as their voices inevitably suffer from some lag and distortion]

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> Zoom IMHO has nailed the workflow for clicking an autodial link on my phone, joining the call by video on my laptop and having the participant pin appear on the screen quick enough that I can type it right as the automated voice prompt asks for it on the phone

This sounds inconvenient? For Meet, I click the invite link from my calendar, email, or meeting list for an upcoming meeting list, or from the slack or other message a coworker sent me for the adhoc one, and I'm in, with video and audio going through the one device.

You have the same option on Zoom. But then, just as in any other videoconferencing app, your audio is now VoIP - an acronym which stands for "heavily compressed, choppy and muffled"

Dialing in from your phone increases the audio quality for everyone by a factor of approximately ∞

Are phone networks better where you're from? The audio compression on the phone network renders the sound quality/clarity inferior to a built in laptop mic in my experience.

I'm in NY currently but have dialed in from several different states in the US and the quality from the phone is always significantly better than VoIP

I just have had a totally different experience then, I have to say. I associate people dialing in from their phones with high levels of background noise, both hissing static and actual background noise, and clipping/lost words. This includes coworkers in Europe and california.

After all, the listener is receiving over VoIP, so you've got phone network issues layered on voip issues.

In Brazil the VoIP calls are tremendously cleaner than directly phone calls, no matter which service is compared (Discord, Meet, Zoom etc)

Also in Manhattan.

Unless there’s an enterprise bandwidth constraint.

Just want to add that I've had this exact experience with people using phone audio with the added variant of them losing cellular signal every few minutes.

Weird, here (france) I made all my family's calls go through VoIP and voice clarity increased a thousandfold, it feels like going from a 1930 radio station to a CD

What’s the preferred service in France for that? Do you mean you set it up yourself with a particular SIP/IAX vendor, or just switched to free.fr or one of those providers?

we all have a VoWifi phone provider and stack

You can also join the Meet in a browser, then under the option memu (...) is “Use a phone for audio”. In that user flow the meeting calls your phone and when you join your devices are linked such that the command-d hot key in the browser will mute/unmute your phone mic.

I've only used Meet once, actually last week, and it took me significantly longer to get on the call because I couldn't start dialing until after clicking "use a phone for audio" whereas with Zoom I call before even joining the call on my computer

Maybe it was user error, but it felt much slower to get everything up and running

Fully agree if you've installed the app on your phone and the drain on your battery is wild.

If you don't have the app, joining via phone is required, finding the number is a few seconds including passcodes and then sometimes passwords which often elude me in terms of their location.

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