The hybrid way of working has raised the bar for video conferencing

After the pandemic, the hybrid way of working became the norm, and along with that, the need for high-quality video conferencing solutions was realized. Organizations where disparate and remote teams work together have increasingly high demands on cameras and sound to make their collective work worthwhile.

“There is no decline in interest in teleconferencing solutions after the pandemic, on the contrary. It seems that we are used to working distributed and now we already have requirements and expectations for high quality in the hybrid model of work”, said Mikhail Mihailov, manager of the Digital Box company, which offers Poly video conferencing solutions in our country. “More and more organizations are looking for professional-grade teleconferencing solutions. These systems are not cheap, but they pay for themselves quickly thanks to the saved costs of employee business trips”.

The difference is palpable. If during the pandemic every worker stayed at home and joined a video connection with colleagues using any web camera and any microphone, today employees gather in offices and want to conduct joint sessions with teams from other locations as a team. The small individual camera gives way to high-class video systems with a quality image, crystal sound and essential amenities such as directional microphones and filtering of ambient noise, said Svetozar Georgiev, a sales specialist at the company.

High standards

Organizations that implement high-end video conferencing systems are mainly of two types. A large proportion are international companies with a distributed branch network covering many physical locations in many countries. In such companies, meetings are held between two, three or more teams of several people at each location, Digital Box explained. Groups gather in halls to connect with each other via video link. Most often these are companies from the sphere of trade, technical support or production.

The other large group of clients with high requirements for video conferences are government organizations – courts, energy companies, hospitals. They need technology that makes it possible to easily communicate between groups of people located in different places, sometimes in different countries. Given the specifics of their work, it is important that in any room where people participate in a teleconference, everything can be heard very clearly, without interruptions and loss of words, by all participants. Reliability is critical – human destinies can depend on it, emphasized the experts from Digital Box.

No wires or cables

One of the conveniences that organizations value a lot when choosing video conferencing equipment is a light environment in terms of connecting cables. In conference rooms, wireless connectivity is not a matter of whim: the cleaner the environment, the safer it is, more visible to other participants and with less risk of breakdowns and technical problems.

Indicative of user criteria is the interest in solutions from the Poly Studio X series – compact all-in-one devices. Calculated for small, medium and large rooms (modifications X30, X50, X70), with each of them the conference room looks simple and neat, because there is only one large screen and a compact video conferencing device next to it – the people, the table and the chairs remain. In addition, the Poly Studio X models work with different types of video software and are very flexible.

People want quick and easy video conferencing solutions, so they don’t have to deal with complicated installation and a lot of ancillary equipment, said the Digital Box specialists. Poly Studio X models are based on the Android operating system, so they are easy to handle, and they are also set up to work with all the mainstream video communication platforms we know – Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Skype.

Well, when it comes to Microsoft Teams, there is also a specialized set for companies that prioritize working with this office software. These are the Poly Studio Teams Rooms models – specially designed sets that meet the needs of teams working with Microsoft’s popular collaboration application.

Quality sound

A major focus in full video conferencing technologies is quality sound. This is because, no matter how good the camera is, in teleconferencing the picture goes through a cloud platform (like Zoom) which reduces the quality of the image for easier transmission. However, this is not the case with sound. It remains in good quality. That’s why it’s important that microphones and audio processing software constantly improve and refine the capabilities that users rely on, explained Digital Box.

For example, in the aforementioned Poly Studio X and Poly Studio Teams Rooms, an artificial intelligence-based algorithm is built in that filters out background noise so that only pure human voices can be transmitted online to the interlocutors on the other end of the teleconference. The technology is designed to focus on a presenter’s voice.

The algorithm has been refined to such an extent that if there is a chaotic conversation or even a heated argument involving everyone present in the presentation room, the algorithm will filter out the voices of the disputants except for the presenter. Called NoiseBlockAL, the software is trained to judge and mute voices that are not leading the discussion.

In fact, most of the technical improvements in today’s audio conferencing systems are entirely software. And the software is updated automatically. This allows the same business video conferencing device to work in the company’s conference room for years without having to replace it with a newer one.

“We sometimes have people come in with phones that are 10 years old—back when Poly was called Polycom—and their devices still work, but they want to expand the configurations. These people confirm the longevity of the approach in question,” emphasized Digital Box.

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