
Improving Audio Quality in Duo with WaveNetEQ - theafh
https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in-duo-with.html
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trishume
I can't wait for gradual improvements in deep learning allow video calls to
extrapolate my presence for longer and longer time segments, until my
connection can drop out for minutes and WebRTC will make it convincingly seem
like I'm still participating in the meeting, making reasonable suggestions for
possible code architectures and screen sharing hallucinated PowerPoint
presentations.

More seriously I worry about cases where it hallucinates the wrong part of a
word and changes the meaning of what I was trying to say. Although we kind of
already live in this world with phone autocorrect and it's mostly fine. I'm
weird though and disable autocorrect on my phone so that when I make a typo
it's obviously a typo instead of just saying a plausible but wrong thing.

~~~
jjoonathan
It was easy to tell when autocorrect switched to machine learning approaches:
instead of getting the basics correct and occasionally missing long words or
proper names, it immediately and aggressively began to attack correct
sentences, committing grade-school grammar mistakes on your behalf if you
weren't vigilant enough to catch it in the act and revert its "helpful"
changes.

~~~
Scoundreller
Or photocopiers changing numbers on you because the compression algo thought
that 6 was an 8:

[https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23588202](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23588202)

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77ko
Duo is sad, and I feel Google is missing the point with all their tech
improvements with Duo but no usability improvements.

I bought a Nest Hub Max for kids and grandparentst for video calls using Duo
with family, and for one on one calls it's great especially for kids who move
around, but with quantine the whole world (my version!) has quickly moved on
to group video calls which ppl can enter and leave as they please.

Consequently everyone has stopped using Duo as it doesn't support that, and
turns out you need to be able to easily chat with your calling group, another
thing duo doesn't support.

Zoom, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger all work much better from a talking to a
family group with varying tech know-how.

Zoom is a dedicated video but works much better than duo as you can make a
link and drop it in a chat group for ppl to join. Duo has no such features!

So my fancy duo called machine is now just a photo display.

~~~
tacomonstrous
Duo supports group calls on mobile devices and browsers FYI.

~~~
modeless
But you can't add or remove people in a call. You have to call everyone
simultaneously up front. If you didn't add someone at the start, you have to
hang up and start a new call, and hope that everyone else hangs up too so they
can join the new call.

Duo has a ton of problems around establishing calls, and identity in general
especially with multiple devices. It also has kind of a mystery meat UI with
unlabeled buttons and undiscoverable interactions. And the artificial
separation between text and video chat (Allo/Duo) never made sense in the
first place, and continues to hamstring Duo even after Allo's death.

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srameshc
I use Signal and Duo a lot to talk to my Dad in India and I can say even with
low bandwidth when nothing else works, Duo audio calls are crisp clear.

~~~
pthatcherg
I work on calling at Signal. If Signal worked for calling your dad in India,
would use it instead of Duo? If so, would you mind helping us improve it by
providing feedback for new builds and that sort of thing? If so, email me at
peter@signal.org. Detailed feedback from you might help a lot.

~~~
indolering
Signal used to not care much about call quality, I'm glad to see a massive
cash infusion is turning that around!

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fulafel
They lead with some very interesting numbers:

" 99% of Google Duo calls need to deal with packet losses, excessive jitter or
network delays. Of those calls, 20% lose more than 3% of the total audio
duration due to network issues, and 10% of calls lose more than 8%."

This sounds very puzzling. If those are packet loss numbers, those conditions
shouldn't be able to carry normal TCP (eg HTTP/HTTPS) traffic properly. And
these are the people ambitious enough to try Duo so probably 20% would be a
lower bound for the unusably-bad-network user share.

Is there published research to correlate these numbers with?

Can there be other explanations? Eg people on mobile connections that just cut
out for long periods of time in middle of calls?

~~~
nobrains
TCP is self correcting. So in the end the receiver gets the whole data,
correctly. But it happens with a delay.

For audio you need real-time synchronous data feed, and cannot wait for the
error correction round trip to happen.

~~~
vbezhenar
IMO you absolutely can wait for round-trips, etc. The problem arises when
delay is not consistent. But if the delay is consistent, it's not a big
problem. When I was child and called my relatives in another country, that's
how it worked and it never was a big problem. It's absolutely better than
discard data and tear voice apart.

So the software should select appropriate delay for current network conditions
and slowly change it if necessary.

~~~
C1sc0cat
You needed to know the dialling hack to force it via cable rather than
satellite.

I think it was adding an extra digit to the dialled number - I have forgotten
the details as it was a long time ago

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yufeng66
I can't tell if this a April fool joke or real

~~~
ttul
Google isn’t doing April Fools this year.

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jepcommenter
Next step is to build speaker model on device and send it to peer during call
setup

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josteink
Not to sound negative, but what’s the point?

Does people really _still_ use a Google-based communication program after all
the ones Google has killed in the past? Is there an actual user base to reach
using them?

Personally I’m avoiding them all and never investing in any of these again.

Also: We’re a few years down Duo still has fewer features than the other
Google-owned IM-product it “replaced” ffs.

Rant over. (And yes, I’m still somewhat sore about that whole Gchat thing and
how that went down.)

~~~
tylerchilds
The thing about Google is that they're pretty R&D heavy. Making Duo into a
killer video app isn't the point, it's to handle all the technical edge cases
in a problem space and then apply that to every system at Google.

I use Google Fi for phone calls and it seems like it's fairly lossy, but they
can take their improvements, such as this from Duo, and apply it using
software to make it less noticeable to me, a user on a completely different
product line.

~~~
stallmanite
Why would a potential customer want to invest time into learning a product
that’s just a temporary research project?

