Meet
Backgrounds, blur and captions
Blur or replace what is behind you, and turn on live captions. Both run on your own device, and no audio ever leaves it.
Both of these happen in your browser, on your own machine. Your camera picture is processed before it is sent, and your speech is turned into text before anything is sent, so the room receives an already blurred picture and already written words. Neither costs anything and neither goes through a server of ours.
Backgrounds#
Open the background picker from the camera button in the call, or from the screen before you join, which is the better place because you can see the result before anybody else does.
- The first time you pick anything other than Off, the effect has to load. It says so, it happens once per tab, and it takes a moment. Somebody who never opens the picker never waits for it.
- Everything is served from Nemi itself, never from somebody else's network, so turning blur on does not announce to a third party that you did.
- Separating you from your room is real work for your computer. On an older laptop in a full call, it is the first thing to switch off if the fan gets loud or your picture starts to stutter.
- If the picker says this browser cannot change your background, that is the browser, not your account. Everything else in the call still works.
Captions#
In the More menu, press Caption what I say. Your browser starts transcribing your own microphone and sends only the resulting text to the other people in the call. No audio leaves your device, not to them and not to us.
That is why it is one switch per person rather than one for the meeting: each browser can only transcribe its own microphone. If you want a full record of a conversation, everybody who talks has to turn it on for themselves.
| Your browser | Can send captions | Can see captions |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome, Edge, Safari | Yes | Yes |
| Anything without a built-in recogniser | No, and the menu says so | Yes |
Seeing other people's captions works everywhere. Contributing your own needs the browser to be able to transcribe.
What happens to the transcript#
When somebody who was captioning leaves the call, what they said is written into the meeting notes: an ordinary Nemi document, owned by the host, which outlives the meeting and can be shared and searched like any other document. The chat and any poll results are written into it too. Two people captioning produce two records in the same document, each under its own heading, rather than one interleaved conversation.
The notes belong to the host and live in the host's workspace, so if you were a guest, the notes are not in your account. Ask the host to share the document. More about what that document is in Whiteboard, notes and polls.
When it does not work#
I turned captions on and nothing appears.
Check the microphone is actually on and is the right one. Captions transcribe the microphone the call is using, so a muted or wrong input produces nothing at all.
Captions stopped part way through the meeting.
They restart themselves after a silence, which is normal. If they stay off, turn them off and on again from the More menu. Nothing said in the meantime is recovered.
My background is patchy around my hair or glasses.
More light in front of you helps more than anything in the settings. A plain wall behind you helps too. Blur hides a rough edge better than a replaced image does.
I have no background or caption buttons at all.
They are still rolling out, and they follow the host's account rather than yours. If the host does not have them switched on yet, nobody in that meeting has them.
Related
Still stuck? Email support@nemilab.com and tell us what you were trying to do.