One drawback to teleconferencing without video is that, unless you are good at voices and know the people in the conference, it's hard to tell who is speaking. Of course the few teleconferences I have participated in have had me as the only female, so everyone knows...
Their name literally lights up on good platforms when they speak. LOL.
Plenty of bad platforms though.
As a company that created the two and a half speaker algorithm for audio, in DSP software, back when this stuff was hard...
We figured that crap out back when we still had to use dumb terminals to manage the calls.
Back then it was called “talk slot monitoring” and only the operator could see it. Anything created after about 2002 that doesn’t show it to participants — is beyond dumb. The actual conferencing industry did all of this long ago.
None of this stuff is new. Just various places vying for market share during Covid. As soon as humans can be released from their reverse-quarantine virtual political cages, nobody will truly want video.
We had it on our desks back then to “eat our own dog food” two decades ago. After the novelty of video wears off, everybody turns it off or points their cameras at inanimate objects. Clocks and toy collections were popular. A few blowhards pointed them at walls with certificates on them, like anybody cared. Ha.
Only takes one or two calls even in a huge team to learn voices. And most folks know their bosses’ voices anyway.
Hate to say it but at least in the corporate world, when mixed with the number of meetings that could have been an e-mail, the vast majority of folks don’t care who’s on most corporate calls... especially the bigger they are.
LOL. “Who are you again? Yeah that’s not your department anyway, but thanks for the input... Bob from Accounting... on how to fix the system problem... why are you here again? There’s literally three people in the entire company that can actually repair this...”
(well, thats what most useful people are thinking while on mute...) hahaha.
Most of us know the ten or maybe twenty people you actually have to work with regularly in any regular sized job. Beyond that it’s another department and the meeting is useless anyway. Introduction meetings are the bosses’ job. After that... we know who’s joining.
For those talking about teaching, yeah there’s some value seeing the student is still awake, true, but make the material hard enough and the test hard enough and even that doesn’t matter. Hahaha.
They’ll stay awake as long as failing the class has real consequences.
Adults anyway. Kids, ahh ... who knows. Reasonable problem.
Been working on multiple big (really big) work projects from home with crap loads of people all year from home. Camera was on once. Was to show one team a funny t-shirt I had on.
Eventually all work related standing meetings become video-not-required real fast. Upload a headshot as an avatar or whatever the platform calls it and call it a decade. Maybe update it in ten years if you haven’t switched companies by then.
I uploaded this as my work avatar seven years ago, I think...? Nobody cares...
https://bukk.it/buck.gif
