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Comment by grzm | Hacker News Reader

High definition audio is great. That said, upwards of 90% of human communication is non-verbal, including body language and facial expressions. One benefit of high-quality audio vs text is that we include intonation. But it doesn't encapsulate everything.

This isn't to say we've cracked that nut with the current state of internet-transmitted video. A blanket "humans communicate via audio neglects these other channels of communication.

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This 90% value is used too much without context. It is not something we can apply for all situation, or every type of information we want to convey. It’s almost seem like a magic joker when there s a debate over using video or not for meetings.

> 90% of human communication is non-verbal,

If true you should be able to communicate effectively without audio. Clearly this is not the case.

raises eyebrows

You can with text

Parent misspoke and instead should have said 'you should be able to communicate effectively without words'.

Obviously the fact that we're communicating 100% of our information currently using text shows that the 90% figure is extremely misleading. 90% of our understanding of a person's character or something maybe comes from their physicality.

The context of this discussion is Zoom/Teams type meetings. My point is that low latency audio is most important in these settings. Low latency is really the key and currently seems to be an unsolved problem in MS Teams at least.

On the flip side I would probably pay more attention if meetings were done french mime style

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