James Bannan06 August 2007, 6:07 AM
No matter where you sit in the room, this new phone from Microsoft will swivel round and follow you.
If conference room phones weren't already bamboozling enough, you should try this new video phone from Microsoft. RoundTable is a conference phone with an in-built 360-degree camera and advanced voice recognition software.
It’s designed to follow the conversation in a meeting by identifying the current speaker and zooming in on their face, then jumping across to the next speaker and so on. The voice recognition software also allows it to keep track of multiple speakers simultaneously.
There’s not too much information available on this product just yet, or about how it actually works.
For example, does each speaker need to program their voice into the unit to be recognisable, or does it build an image of where everyone is by their position in the room?
Will it fail if one speaker moves around?
These any many more questions will be answered within the next couple of days, as there’s a product demo at Microsoft Tech.Ed 2007, which starts tomorrow on the Gold Coast, and I’ll be there with camera at the ready.
It’s going to be interesting to see how the end-user experiences a meeting hosted using a RoundTable unit.
Certainly seeing a meeting via webcam can be an intensely boring experience, with the unit zoomed out to capture everyone, yet with no-one moving around it’s like watching a static image.
Zooming in on the speaker will give a much better face-to-face experience, but this might come at the expense of getting a feel for the layout of the room.
Is it a price worth paying? We’ll find out.
RoundTable is obviously a key part of Microsoft's push for tying together existing communications systems in companies with Microsoft servers coordinating the whole lot.
They call it "Microsoft Unified Communications", and, naturally, it hinges around customers buying one or more of Office Communication Server 2007 (now a public beta), Office Communicator 2007, Exchange Server 2007, Office 2007 and Live Communications Server 2005.
But until now, Microsoft has stayed largely out of communications hardware. The only two Microsoft devices listed on the Unified Communications website are Windows Mobile Devices -- and RoundTable.