If the software uses our computers' microphones, why can't we use it during a Zoom call?
Great question! If you are using your computer’s speakers to output your zoom call, your machine will often filter the output from the input stream, so your microphone won’t pass along sound data from what was said in the call. However, if you use Knowtworthy on a different device from the one on which you are recording (like taking the call from a phone and running Knowtworthy on your computer) there wouldn’t be any issues and you would get full transcripts from your microphone. Also, we do have zoom and google meet integrations on our roadmap, so eventually, you will be able to record directly through a conference call as well. Hope this helps!
Thanks for the reply. As follow up questions,
1) How soon do you expect to have the Zoom integration?
2) Would that mean I would have to install a plugin in Zoom to integrate with Knowtworthy? (This would not work for me, because I'm frequently in client meetings where I am not the Zoom admin and can't do that.)
3) Is there a reason you can't record both the laptop's microphone input and speaker output?
No problem! I can address these questions as well.
1) We already have our priority features set for Q4 of this year based on our requests and votes on our public roadmap [https://trello.com/invite/b/p6BM4lBu/0d4bb05bda3a71098602b5b1698e4c33/roadmap] but the Zoom and Google Meet integrations are highly requested as well so we are hoping to address this feature in the following release in early 2023. The good thing about the lifetime licenses is that you’ll get access to these updates as soon as they roll out :)
2) We have not yet completely decided on what our Zoom integration implementation will look like. Concretely, we are investigating a plugin option and a bot option (that will join the meetings you are in). I will make a note on the related card on our roadmap that you would prefer the bot option instead of the plugin option!
3) Unfortunately, there is. From a technical standpoint, we can interface with the microphone and camera inputs of a computer through a browser’s media API, but the same cannot be done for outputs. Specifically, a given browser tab does not have access to audio output data of any other tab or any other application on your computer. This is done for security reasons as a tab having knowledge of other processes and data on your computer would be prone to malicious data collection. As a result, we can only process what your computer hears through its microphone.