Yes, we’ve covered new meeting software ad nauseam at this point, but can we help it if there’s still so much to surface here?
Last week, Headroom debuted its meeting software to the community. At a time when Zoom is still making headlines, what makes a competitor like Headroom stand out?
The tool is focused on filling user experience gaps, using AI to power the real-time legwork that goes along with having a meeting. And the founding team is stacked with AI expertise.
That includes co-founder Andrew Rabinovich, an ex-Google software engineer who worked on computer vision and ML algorithms for photo and video annotation. Prior to starting Headroom, he spent five years at Magic Leap where he was the Head of AI. Co-founder Julian Green is also an ex-Googler where he launched computer vision products like the Cloud Vision API and managed deep-tech moonshots (i.e. "innovation that achieves the previously unthinkable.”)
“Headroom uses real-time AI to make video conferencing smarter and more natural,” wrote Green on the launch page. That includes “enhanced video and audio quality at lower bandwidth, real-time transcripts, one-click notes, gesture recognition, real-time share of speaking time by participant, cloud video recordings and replays, searchable transcripts and notes.”
The demo illustrates the features, and we have to agree with the video that “the best part” seems to be that everything (across transcripts and collaborative notes) is searchable.
While we haven’t seen real-time gestures before (which are fun and much easier than finding reactions on your keyboard), we have been watching makers launch real-time, collaborative note-taking Zoom apps over the last year. Just last week we also saw Richard White's launch of Fathom, which shot to #1 Product of the Day and aims to eliminate note-taking on Zoom calls.
So if you want to keep Zoom at the top of your work vernacular, you can “circle back” to some of those apps. If you want to try Headroom, now’s a great time to do so and share feedback with the makers. The tool is free.
Green also threw out a challenge to “discover the 4th gesture recognized in Headroom meetings… 👍 👎 ✋ ? ... No, not that one!”
The team at Tackle has hackathon-ed a fun Year in Review report that almost makes all those could-have-been-an-email calls worth it.
Connect your Gcal to get stats, like hours spent in meetings and how many new people you met with over the year.
Since “stats are sometimes dull [the team] wrapped it around a space flight 🚀, Jeff Bezos style.”
Stenography is a new plain English codebase documenter that uses AI (via Codex) and code parsing techniques. Maker Bram Adams created Stenography to decrease developers’ cognitive load.
Adams explained the parser layer of the product finds sufficiently complex code blocks “us[ing] my and other developer's expertise in their native coding language… to determine where the RIGHT code is for the AI to step in,” while the explanation layer approaches the best way to describe the code.