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Comment by smelendez | Hacker News Reader

I find video chat to be the worst business communication tool, unless you need screen sharing.

It's still a mystery to me why people so often prefer it over the traditional phone, which has better audio and reliability and doesn't force everyone to regulate their posture, get in a professional looking location, etc

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For some reason I can easily understand people on video chat even if they have strong accent whereas I can't grok anything on a phone call. I have had my hearing tested, it's not it.

Also I feel that on video chat it is way easier to interject (if the camera is set up properly) than on a audio call with multiple people.

I wonder how much of that is phone line quality, or visual clues like lip reading.

Probably a mix of both. I also have trouble understanding people in somewhat noisy environments so I think I just suck at cocktail party problems.

Curios! I have the same problem. My wife has the theory that I cannot filter all the other distractions well enough. Good to know I'm not alone ;)

I have exactly opposite experience. On the phone call I lower my head, close my eyes and focus on the sound of what's being said. While on video call when I don't understand someone when I see the person that expects to be understood it has a bit of "deer in the headlights" effect for me. My mind closes and I have no chance of understanding.

Video chat often has better audio quality than phone calls. HD calls are still rare, even on VoIP. POTS is almost guaranteed to cut off at 3.2kHz which cuts out a lot of information.

> Video chat often has better audio quality than phone calls.

That has not been my experience. Generally the audio suffers as the compression algorithm switches to accommodate poor network performance.

This all might be moot if you're on the same LAN, such as in the same office (that is, until you have dozens or hundreds of video chats eating up the bandwidth). But add in folks in another location and/or working remotely, and video chat is just terrible.

It's not that bad normally (I get to do that every day). ADSL 12mbit was enough to handle high quality Google hangouts up and down. More people only impact the centralised service, not your connection (unless you're using a really terrible conference implementation)

>For some reason I can easily understand people on video chat even if they have strong accent whereas I can't grok anything on a phone call.

See the McGurk Effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0

> traditional phone, which has better audio

Now, I'm not sure what video chat tool you're referring to, but POTS audio is awful, even the more modern stuff available for cell-to-cell isn't great unless you happen to have VoLTE - any halfway decent mic and modern audio codec will be much better.

I wonder if the previous poster is actually referring to a perceptual issue around latency — because the video latency is perceptibly greater than a face-to-face conversation, we may perceive unpleasantness in the audio as well, even though a phone call or audio-only Internet call are generally acceptable.

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