Online meetings

A home group or a meeting across countries is not a Sunday lectern. The voice you need may already be coming out of the computer. Breeze can hear that call, if the laptop speakers are on and echo cancellation is off.

This is not the way to run a service in the room. It is for a meeting where people are already on Zoom, Meet, or something like them, and one laptop is listening.

You will not get a perfect translation. People talking over each other, and a voice a little further from the microphone, will make it less clear. Welcome still matters more than a flawless translation, and a few practical steps can really help.

What you need

• The control panel open in Chrome or Edge on a computer.
• The meeting playing through the computer’s speakers, not headphones. Headphones mean the microphone never hears the other people.
• One person near the laptop, so their voice and the speakers can both be heard. Ask people not to talk over each other.

Breeze does not join the Zoom call. It listens to the room the laptop is in, including the sound coming from the laptop’s speakers.

Turn echo cancellation off

Echo cancellation is there to delete whatever the computer is playing, so a video call does not hear itself. That is the voice you want Breeze to keep.

1. Open the control panel and go to Settings.
2. Find Audio Processing.
3. If Use browser defaults is on, turn it off. While it is on, the switches underneath do nothing.
4. Turn Echo cancellation off.
5. Turn Noise suppression off as well. The other person’s voice is quieter and further away, and suppression often treats it as noise.

Echo cancellation is already off unless someone has turned it on. Check it before the meeting.

On the screen you should see Audio Processing with Echo cancellation and Noise suppression both off. A screenshot of those switches, named online-meetings-echo-cancellation.png, can sit here when we have one of the real settings dialog.

Start the stream only after those switches are off. Then share the listener link as usual. Each person on the call can open it and pick a language.

If it is not hearing them

• You are on headphones. Switch to the computer’s speakers.
• Echo cancellation is still on, or Use browser defaults is on.
• The sound meter in the control panel does not move when the other person speaks. Move the laptop closer to the speakers, and turn the call up a little.
• Two people are speaking at once. Pause between voices.

For a sermon in the room, use a microphone close to the person speaking. See Audio input.