Backgrounds, blur and captions

These two are on the same page because they are both in the More menu, and they are as different as two features in a meeting can be. A background is processed in your own browser and the room receives an already blurred picture, so nothing extra leaves your machine. Captions are the opposite: they are the one part of a meeting where audio is sent somewhere to be read. Each section below says which is which.

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 or picking a photo does not announce to a third party that you did.
• A background you picked in an earlier version (Dusk, Paper, Ink or Bloom) is swapped for the photo closest to it the next time you join, rather than switched off.
• 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#

Live captions are one switch for the whole meeting and only the host has it. In the More menu, press Turn on captions. The audio of everybody in the meeting is mixed together in the host's browser and sent to a transcription service in the European Union, which sends back the words. Those words appear under the video for everyone in the call and are written into the meeting notes at the end.

While captions are on, the top of the room says Captions on for every participant, guests included, and hovering it says who turned them on. It appears the moment the switch is pressed rather than at the first word, so a quiet room still tells you what is happening in it. Turning captions off stops the audio being sent at that moment.

Who said what#

The transcription tells voices apart on its own and Nemi matches each voice to a participant by who was speaking at the time, so lines carry names rather than "Speaker 1". A voice it has not been able to match yet is shown as a speaker number instead of a guess, and once it is matched, the earlier lines in the transcript are corrected too.

It is spoken in Dutch and English. A meeting in another language is transcribed less well, and a meeting that switches between Dutch and English is handled.

How much is included#

Captions are counted in hours per calendar month against the account of whoever hosts the meeting, not against the people in it. Joining somebody else's meeting never uses your own hours, and hosting one never uses theirs.

When the month's hours run out, captions stop and the meeting carries on exactly as it was. A message says which plan the hours belonged to. The allowance starts again at the beginning of the next calendar month and nothing carries over.

What happens to the transcript#

When the host leaves the call, what was 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. Only the settled lines are kept, so the notes read as sentences rather than as a recogniser thinking out loud.

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#