Video Chat Pain Points: What's Broken in Google Meet, Teams, Jitsi, and Others?
Hey PH community! As we all rely on video calls more than ever, I'm curious about your biggest frustrations with tools like Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Jitsi, or even the infamous Cluey. Do clunky interfaces, poor AI integrations, or a lack of admin controls (like forcing video on for interviews) drive you nuts?
I'm thinking about adding video chat to Blimp (getblimpy.cloud), our AI-native productivity suite. Imagine an AI assistant that quietly takes minutes in the background (non-intrusive), auto-generates bullet-point actions as tasks in your project hub (ditching those sloppy AI emails), plus admin perks like mandatory video, global audio muting, and background video effects that don't slow down your video.
What are your top video chat pain points? Share below—your ideas could shape this! 🚀
Replies
I have noticed that sometimes Meet’s video quality fluctuates for no obvious reason like you’d think switching cameras or hopping between devices would be seamless, but nope, it gets all blurry or jittery out of nowhere.
Blimp
@drew_dunham This definitely needs a fix
google meet's recording function is actually quite good (for pro accounts). it has auto transcription as well, that adds to the video directly as subtitles, and you can just ask gemini to sum up everything or ask it questions
I do tend to favor Google meet as I am in the Google ecosystem with using Gmail, docs, sheets, and even Gemini. Most of my clients are the same as well. I'd be grudgingly installed zoom for those who insist on having Zoom meetings.
You touched down an important point when you mentioned video. I feel that both meet and zoom both assume heavily that you want all of your data going through them. They've been a number of times that I wanted to rely on Google meet but had no intention of having a video chat. I had a client with a small laptop screen that I wanted to walk through something with and although you can have video off, it's confusing for those who aren't familiar with it. A simple option of saying that we're just screen sharing and using our microphones would be nice. Granted you could do that, but it's not straightforward and the interface seems to dissuade you from wanting to do that.
I have used Geminis notetaking a few times. I'm the kind of odd person that has a really good memory of meetings and can create very thorough notes from the discussion on the very important points. I did have to try it and I found it to be very interesting in the way that it summarized. But it is devoid of really emotional memory and human motivations so it will miss a few things, but I don't expect AI to get too deeply into peoples brains.
I think they're really are two aspects of a Google meet-like product, the connection of two human beings and the sharing of something. Google meet is really good at sharing things in which you can select a screen a browser or just a tab, it does allow markup, which I think is very helpful. Being able to define a section would be really helpful as well. So if you are demoing something and your futzing with controls you might just want the recipient to see the result.
Flipping back-and-forth between sharing, I think is important.
I also use team viewer so if I truly want control over someone's computer, I rely on that and then just make a phone call.
But that would be an awfully nice trick for a meet up software to do and would sort of eat the lunch of products like team viewer
Just my two cents.
Blimp
@markbradford Thanks for the thorough feedback, Mark! It wouldn't be too bad to build something that emulates what already works, but also adds something for the users. Something humane and that eliminates any other inconveniences and actually makes the video chat experience epic.