Audio

9 Comments

Just tried iChat AV with Kam (audio only, 'cause neither one of us has a video camera); not great signal, perhaps 'cause she's on dialup at the moment rather than broadband, but pretty cool. Free phone calls!

I think it would work better, though, with a headset (earphone and microphone) and broadband on both ends.

Now I want to try out videophone. Someone at work had an iSight (teeny new Apple video camera, perhaps a little bigger than a D-cell battery); not quite willing to plunk down $150 for one yet, but maybe at some point.

9 Responses to “Audio”

  1. Will Quale

    What amazes me most about this technology is . . . I tried it out in 1995. C-U-C-ME (or some such spelling) was real-time A/V conferencing, freeware, developed by some university. It was a bit buggy and useless if you weren’t on broadband, and the signal wasn’t even very good on Swat’s connection, but it was there. I can’t believe it really took eight years for this to take off, and the cynic in me suspects some sort of interference from the telecom industry (like the movie industry delaying the releases of VCRs and DVD-recorders). . . .

    Still, cool that Apple has it.

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  2. Jenn Reese

    I’ve been trying to get the audio to work with my friend in Dallas, but it won’t. One of us initiates the call, the other person responds and then gets a “Such-n-such is not responding” message. Phooey!! Now she’s complaining because of the “ugly green icons” on her interface. In case you want to try it with me, Jed, my IM is indianajenn. I have broadband on a wireless network.

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  3. Mary Anne

    Jed, I’m confused. Do you need a video camera to use this? And if so, do you actually already have one that I don’t know about? And if I don’t have one but you do, can we still use it and I can see you? 🙂

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  4. Mary Anne

    Oh, never mind, I didn’t read your entry properly. Sigh.

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  5. Mary Anne

    But it looks like I can’t download it anyway, since I’m using 10.1.5 and it says I need 10.2.5 or later. Sigh again. Technology doesn’t love me, even though I love it.

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  6. Vardibidian

    I’ve used Microsoft’s Netmeeting (on my end) to videoconference over the internet from my DSL connection to a friend with an Apple of some kind and a DSL connection. This was a year ago or so. It wasn’t particularly good; the video was intermittent, and we needed to hang up and re-initiate several times over the course of each half-hour chat. We did find that a headset helped.

    Ultimately, it wasn’t worth the agita. We’re barely paying for long-distance anyway, and I’m just not that attractive.

    Thank you,
    -Vardibidian.

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  7. Jed

    Well, people have been predicting vidphones since the dawn of telephony (Kam said last night there was a comic strip published shortly after telephones were invented that featured a video phone), but it’s never happened. And they’ve been invented several times, but they’ve never taken off. And, yeah, there’ve been a variety of kinds of video conferencing software over the past decade, and none of them have really taken off either. (Except for webcams, of course, but I haven’t heard of people using those for two-way communication.)

    I think there are several things going on:

    First, the technology hasn’t been there. The widespread use of broadband is a recent development, and it’s still far from ubiquitous.

    Relatedly, the video has always been jerky and slow. It’s not clear to me whether Apple’s new offering fixes that; I haven’t yet seen it in action, and I’ve heard that it’s not as good as one would hope.

    But perhaps most importantly, despite the instant allure of the concept, most people don’t appear to actually want it. If you’re working at home and voice-phoning in for a meeting, your co-workers can’t tell if you’re sitting around in your underwear. And cordless phones have freed people from the tyranny of having to stay in one place while talking on the phone; vidphones would require you to drag a camera around with you. (And the telephone goes next to your ear, which makes it convenient to hold; a video camera has to be at least a little ways away from you to get a good image, which makes it awkward to hold even if it’s portable.)

    Of course, many of the same arguments could be said about audio chat vs text chat. Why would anyone want to reveal that they’re drunk enough to be slurring their words, if they can still type straight? And audio chat makes pauses much more noticeable—it has to take place in realtime. And there’s no record of what was last said, so you can’t just look back at the scrolling log. And you can’t have a private audio chat in a crowded office. And so on. And yet, all of these arguments are clearly bogus, since people love telephones. (Also, I gather that “voice over IP” (a.k.a. Internet telephony) is fairly popular, and the audio side of iChat AV is really just a variant on that.)

    Still, for whatever reason, vidphones haven’t yet caught on. It’s possible that iChat AV and the iSight will provide the right level of friendly ease of use, but I wouldn’t count on it.

    But I still think it’s cool, and would still like to try it at some point.

    Btw, long-distance calls are relatively cheap these days, but international calls are still fairly expensive; if the lag time isn’t too high, and the person in the other country has broadband, it seems like this might be a cool way to do international calls.

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  8. WIll Quale

    And cordless phones have freed people from the tyranny of having to stay in one place while talking on the phone; vidphones would require you to drag a camera around with you.

    The solution, of course, is the iHoverCam, though I somehow doubt intelligent anti-grav mobile cameras will be up and running during iSight’s lifespan.

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  9. Will Quale

    Oh, and here’s a software solution to the “but I like to sit around in my underwear while on the phone” issue: as an extension of speech-to-text dictation software, pipe the text to a 3-D model of a head which can translate text-and-speech input to natural real-time mouth movements. Add in some random gestures (which could be controlled by meta-keys — press apple-Y to yawn, apple-R to cock head to the right, etc — for added realism.

    Then you could (a) make the model head realistically model your head, so your boss can’t tell that you’re undressed, or (b) make the model head be someone else’s head — say, John Cusack’s, he’s good-looking.

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