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1597 points seapunk | 4 comments | | HN request time: 0.661s | source
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meritt ◴[] No.22703456[source]
It works really well.

One that has been a total game changer for my company is when I'm hosting a conference call, I can simply "Invite by Phone" my participants. They get a phone call, are prompted to "Press 1 to enter the conference", and boom they're in. It's drastically reduced people fumbling around with phone numbers + participant codes, ending up in the wrong meeting, or getting stuck in some unnecessary software install loop. If someone is more than two minutes late, they're getting a phone call that brings them instantly into the meeting.

Also a really nice feature, again for phone conferences, is when people dial-in I see their phone number handle in the UI. But during the call as they introduce themselves or I look up their number, I can then rename their user to something recognizable. Now if I'm on a call with 5 people at another firm, I appear really impressive because I know who each person is by their name. When someone is speaking on the conference call, their icon lights up. If someone has a ton of background noise I can easily mute them.

Zoom Phone (addl paid feature) is awesome too. Virtual phone numbers, IVR, call routing, busy hours, I can instantly turn a 1:1 conversation into a zoom meeting that other people can join, etc. Zoom Phone works on my iphone like a regular dialer, and I can place/receive fully digital calls on it (pretty similar to how Google Voice works), so it doesn't matter if I have actual cell service.

I've never used Microsoft Teams, and does look really snazzy, but Zoom is an absolute joy to use compared to every single other conferencing software I have ever used. The video chat and screensharing is fast and responsive and just works exactly like you would expect it to.

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angrygoat ◴[] No.22704074[source]
Another pretty great thing with Zoom is that it'll keep a call up even if, say, your home internet drops out and you switch to tethering on your phone. It sounds rare, but with Australian internet or dodgy campus wifi, this is a really useful feature.
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1. xenonite ◴[] No.22704211[source]
Well I think this a standard feature of conference call software, you can quit and re-join at any time.
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2. djrogers ◴[] No.22704289[source]
No, you've missed the point - you don't quit and rejoin, it just freaking stays up. It's really remarkable - I can switch networks and VPNs on my macbook any time during a screensharing session and get nothing more than a slight delay for a second on video, and zero perceptible drop on audio.
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3. tialaramex ◴[] No.22704440[source]
I'm not sure about remarkable, it's a quality of implementation issue. Around the turn of the century I worked on an EU project where we did this for voice calls with IPv6.

In the present era QUIC can support doing this, although whether that'll be something every popular implementation actually does remains to be seen, but again a high quality implementation will be able to just rebind - "Hi, this is still me, I just have a different network address now" and carry on seamlessly.

4. xur17 ◴[] No.22704797[source]
It's also very good at handling connection slowdowns. It will drop video first, while audio keeps flowing. If someone loses their connection altogether, it buffers their voice, and plays it back slightly faster to catch up (sounds weird, but it really works).