Audio Feedback Loops
We need a feature (similar to Skype for Business) to control how a user joins the audio portion of the meeting. The product works perfectly right now if everyone uses telephony headsets, but get 4 Surface Pros in a room, have everyone click the "Join" button and then wait for your ears to bleed as the audio all feeds back.
Even having 3 out of 4 users click the mute button doesn't solve the problem because the meeting audio is still coming out of their speakers and feeding back into the one user who is using their mic to run the meeting. We use simple USB speakerphones and our basic use case is several people in a meeting room with a single user using the USB phone as mic/speakers for the group.
Teams needs options for join audio, call me on my phone, and turn off audio, BOTH when entering a meeting and once in the meeting so the user can quickly change meeting modes.
Todd Garrison
shared this idea
16 comments
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Anonymous
commented
We use Teams, everyone is remote and the feedback is annoying. Why!
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Anonymous
commented
Skype for Business had a ' Are you in the skype room prompt' that set the audio automatically. Would be nice to have this feature
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Kent Seymour
commented
I totally agree.
I think the smartest and most user-friendly thing Microsoft could do is to ask a simple question for each meeting participant (whether during the invite OR during the join meeting step OR for the meeting organizer as he/she selects participants), "I notice you have a room system for this meeting. Will you (this participant) be in the room for the meeting or will you (this participant be joining the meeting from somewhere else?"
After you gather that information, Teams could determine the audio and video options for the users. People in the room join with no video, and both their mic and speakers are muted. People outside the room get three options mic on/off, speaker on/off, video on/off, but default behavior is for mic and speaker to be on, video off.
Simple. And it's amazing this isn't already how it works....
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J
commented
Preventing us from using Teams for all meetings. Forced to use it but, now breaking the rules to avoid running meetings in Teams. Our external customers hate it also - Joke
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Justin Horne
commented
This is beyond annoying! Our users are requesting we "dump Teams" as this is a nightmare on calls. Any update MS?
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Brian W
commented
At this point, despite an initiative to switch to Teams, I'm using WebEx for conferencing. If I MUST use Teams, we turn the audio off and use a separate conference line.
The audio feedback is a nightmare.
As Kenneth said, every other software has solved this one; why can't Microsoft... -
Kenneth Wells
commented
It seems like every other online meeting software (for example WebEx) has solved this problem. Why is this such a mystery?
I am in a room by myself, trying to listen to the meeting and still be able to talk. But it's ear bleeding feedback. The UI has too many useless and inconsistent interaction mechanisms to get the hang of anything. Sometimes Microsoft continues to advertise and clutter their ui with marketing features and pizzas after the software has been purchased.
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Joe J
commented
It would be great to have an easy way to turn off the speakers in addition to turning off the mic when in a meeting. This is much easier than muting the mic and then having to hunt to turn off the speakers.
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Marcus
commented
Only 42 votes? I am sure the rest of the enterprises of the world are having this same issue. The execs hate it.
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Tim
commented
Not sure if you noticed but when you join a teams meeting you now have an Audio Off option to prevent any echo with a joined in room system. Microsoft doesn't make this button very visible and is often over looked by our end users. Microsoft please make this button more visible in the UI so users don't ignore it. Often we have 10+ people with their laptops in a conference room that is also connected to the meeting. These users are not going to know that the Audio Off button will prevent the echo and feedback.
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Joe Rago
commented
I had that issue on a demo last Thursday. It made a 15 minute demo take 45 minutes because of all the feedback. Ridiculous.
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Jesse Amerson
commented
Please address this issue. It is not a technical issue but clearly a usability issue. I have been in numerous meetings where the first 10 minutes are wasted as we all try to determine who needs to mute their microphone, speakers or both. We've deployed Teams across many parts of our enterprise so the likelihood that there will be remote users, and multiple users in the same room in different locations is very high. This kind of issue turns off executives who are the same leaders we need to champion a complete cutover to Teams.
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Aaron F.
commented
Here in my office, we each join the meeting and then use a single conference phone to connect into multi-site meetings. We see how 'audio off' is an option, but it would be nice if it was more direct giving audio options.
We are spoiled as audio options are an immediate pop-up in Cisco WebEx which we are coming from.
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Jason Darst
commented
I totally agree. They have the toggle for the microphone, but nothing for speakers. So you have to turn off all sound on your computer to prevent a feedback loop. And then remember to turn your sound on later to hear notifications and other things. It would be much better to have a no audio join option like Skype has.
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Anonymous
commented
Yes! Feedback loops are a HUGE problem for our Team users. "Join with audio off" should be in the same "Join now" list with the "video off", "blur background", and "microphone off" toggle buttons. Currently, it is a link below all the other options.
Personally, I assumed it was a toggle because it shows an icon with a "disabled speaker" (slash through it) which I interpreted as meaning that the speakers were already disabled. I couldn't understand why my speakers were NOT disabled when the icon clearly showed that they were. It's inconsistent with the behavior of the "video off", "blur background", and "microphone off" icons, which do display a slash through the icons to indicate the current state.
Also, ideally, the state of each of these buttons would be saved from the last time you used Teams so a user can be sure they are ALWAYS joining with "audio off" and "microphone off", they desire to do so. It would be good to display a reminder, though, that they are joining with mic and speakers off.
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Jed Boulton
commented
if I could vote for this 100 times I would. The Teams app needs to do a better job controlling microphones and especially speakers. if using the "call me" feature it does not disable the speakers on the same Teams app. so Immediate feedback loops, the workaround is to turn down the speakers on your computer. But as I found when you connect to a screen via miracast you then have to turn down the TV or it will create a feedback look.
