Google’s trying to fix your crappy webcam with great AI

Image: Google

It's a good chance you've spent most of the last two-plus years sitting at home, staring into your laptop's camera and talking into your mic. You have spent the last two-plus years appearing to everyone else as if you are shouting from inside a tin can. It's not your fault, your laptop'sWebcam just sucks. And so does its mic. They can be fixed with the help of artificial intelligence.

At its annual I/O developer conference on Wednesday, the Workspace team at Google announced that they have been working on ways to improve virtual meetings. Portrait Restore can improve and sharpen your image even if you have a bad connection or a bad camera. Portrait Lighting gives you a set of controls over how you are lit. You can move the window to your left, but you can also make it look like you have one to your right, according to the search engine. The de-reverberation tool is meant to minimize the echoes that come from talking into your laptop from a home office.

Image: Google

A lot of the underlying tech here comes from the machine learning and artificial intelligence work done by the company. The company's VP of digital work experience said the principle is the same, even though those have better hardware to work with.

Setty said in an interview that the team has been thinking about how to make work easier in the last couple of years.

Image: Google

The new tool will allow you to log on in the morning and catch up without having to read hundreds of messages. It is also launching an automated service for Meet meetings, with plans to eventually summarize those.

Setty said that they want to be able to help people handle the overload of information. He said that they are trying to keep everyone on an equal playing field no matter where they are. Setty said that one trick for the company was to help people without getting too involved, or to make employees feel like they are being watched. Give them the choice of how they expose that information to their teams.

It's nice to have a few tools to make your setup work a little better, especially ones that don't require new apps or gear. The problem of the hybrid meeting, with some people in a room and others on a screen, is going to be a bigger challenge for the company as people go back to the office. It will take more than good lighting and de-reverb.