Show HN: Squawk – Walkie Talkie for Teams | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Squawk – Walkie Talkie for Teams

squawk.to

153 pointszumachase114 comments

This is cool. I can't wait to try it out!

Crazy Feature request: One of the things I've wanted for years out of a software based walkie-talkie like this is manual audio spacial diversity control (a.k.a. 3D audio). That way I can have multiple simultaneous channels, but be able to change the position (left/right/forward/45deg/etc) and the volume of each feed so I can have situational awareness with all channels while being able to use my brain to separate and focus on a particular channel.

These kinds of systems are often marketed to dispatch agencies, mission control, government/military customers, etc, and are super expensive[0]. I've never seen a consumer-grade version of 3D audio like this, but that would be super beneficial to ad-hoc communicators in disasters, scanner enthusiasts, public event coordinators, county/city-level EOCs that can't afford expensive systems.

[0]:https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/24741/new-3d-audio-wil...

Thanks! The tech in the link is awesome...might be above our pay grade.

It's definitely doable. Dolby Axon (which shut down a few years ago) had positional voice chat.

It should be easy to integrate game audio engines, such as OpenALSoft.

Aureal A3D. Technology was developed in the nineties for NASA. Stolen by Creative. Creative simultaneously stole their patented tech and sued Aureal for bogus patent infringement. Aureal "won" the Lawsuit, but ran out of money due to legal fees. Creative bought their assets, IP and funny declaration releasing them from any damages from lost patent lawsuit.

Patents long expired, nowadays smallest $2 microcontroller can run it in real time.

Aha! I'm a huge fan of positional voice audio in video games. Mumble has a positional audio feature[0] that is relatively straightforward to integrate via mods. I built a mod[1] recently that adds support to Raft, and I attempted to list some of the benefits in the readme. In my experience, it completely changes the feeling of talking with people online; they become their avatars. I'd love to see it come to discord or zoom, and be lifted out of the video game space.

I haven't looked at Mumble's actual implementation, but I imagine it's possible with the web audio APIs.

[0]: https://wiki.mumble.info/wiki/Positional-Audio [1]: https://www.raftmodding.com/mods/mumble-link

I love that Mumble has that, but I wish it were possible/easy to enable it without a video game and manually position participants.

As for webapps, I think Mozilla Hubs does this: https://hubs.mozilla.com/#/

...as does Freeswitch I believe, though I've had a heck of a time trying to get that up and running: https://freeswitch.org/confluence/display/FREESWITCH/mod_con...

I would love for MozIlla hubs (or any similar app for that matter) to allow one to set a webcam feed as your avatar's "head".

If anyone knows of such a thing please let me know. Would be perfect for socialising during quarantine and beyond.

It's at the other end of the spectrum, but Remotion is really cool and does what you describe. We wanted to get away from always on video, but I know lots of people like that. I cannot say enough good things about what the Remotion team are doing.

Kosmo.io has a poker app where your webcam feed sits at your seat at the table.

You might be interested in https://www.calla.chat/ ( https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla ) which supports spatialized audio based on participant location on a top-down map.

Edit: in some ways, this might be totally off-base since it does involve a game and participant self-arrangement. Hopefully it's somewhat relevant, though!

I could be wrong, but based on the README this looks like it just sets speaker volume based on position - which is neat, but is not quite positional audio.

I wondered about that too, and found https://github.com/capnmidnight/Calla/commit/abc851b49bd1801... before commenting which seemed to indicate that there's at least stereo positioning. It's possible I'm mistaken though.

Oh interesting, it looks like you're right! They do appear to be using a StereoPannerNode rather than the full 3D PannerNode[0], but that is more than just speaker attenuation.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A...

That's an old commit. It's had spatialized audio for the last month, at least.

I'm actually going to put a feature back in to let you select the audio "spatialization" model, because some folks have had trouble with PannerNode not working right. I used to have a selection between volume scaling, StereoPannerNode, and PannerNode. Been a little too busy at the day job to do it lately.

I have some multi-tenant PBXs based on Freeswitch however, I have not seen a positional audio feature in Freeswitch. Can you give more insight? Your link is the conference module and unrelated I believe.

I made a proof of concept chrome extension a bit ago: https://github.com/anateus/amphisonic

Currently re-writing it to be actually decent code. Basically, it takes up streams on the page and arranges speakers in a semi-circle in front of you, letting you adjust the radius (I've found for particular numbers of speakers there's an optimal radius for speaker separation).

The now defunct Dolby Axon had this feature for up to 50 people. It was great, you could drag people in a grid around you (see picture in [1]). I’m still sad they discontinued it, it’s one of the few voice chat services that I would gladly pay money for.

[1]: https://venturebeat.com/2009/09/04/dolby-launches-axon-surro...

Check out https://www.highfidelity.com/

I know it's not really what you are asking for, but it's some very cool spatial audio work, letting you separate out where folks are in a virtual space.

[disclaimer, I know some of the folks working on it]

I tried out highfidelity a couple weeks ago and didn't get any of the directional audio to work. There was a radial but not an angular effect if that makes sense.

interesting. It was working for me on Chrome, I could differentiate left/right

I wish podcast producers would do this (or more of them at least in case anyone knows of one). I’ve done it manually as an experiment and it definitely improves clarity in cases where there are 4 or more drunk folks taking over each other.

Virtual Airwaves is working in this space.

https://virtualairwaves.com/

and see their iOS app: https://appsto.re/us/jrj3hb.i and the web app: https://cb.virtualairwaves.com/channel/1

They have several patents on "3D Audio" style techniques to give distance cues via the signal:

See:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US9730023

Hooray! I have been holding out hope for more push-to-talk apps on desktop platforms. It's such a step up from always-on listening. As an audio engineer, I grit my teeth every time there is microphone feedback, echo, or other audio issues on group calls, and these generally don't occur on PTT apps because everyone tends to be muted most of the time. And if it does start happening, the user more easily realizes what they did wrong because they correlate it with the button press. In fact, even if the user does not realize what they did wrong, others on the call can identify the source because "it's only happening when Jane speaks." I can't tell you how many times I've been on a call with feedback where the person who is causing it is complaining about it to the group without realizing it's their own fault and others on the call don't necessarily know, either. This never happens on PTT calls. There's also the obvious privacy benefits, as it avoids the issue where people speak without realizing they are unmuted. PTT is better in nearly every respect. I'm very excited about this.

I do have some questions that the website doesn't answer for me:

1. What about screen sharing? Seeing the word "collaboration" implies to me that I should be able to do so, but it's unclear. In the screenshot of the app, I see an icon or two in the right-hand sidebar that might be relevant to this, but they seem kind of generic.

2. What about mobile devices? I routinely do Slack calls where one or two people are on their phone for various reasons. It would be useful to know if that is supported or will be at some point.

3. I want to know more about the encryption. As you're probably aware, there has been a lot of controversy over the security of Zoom. In particular, there is an ongoing lawsuit related to their false claims of end-to-end encryption. [1] I think any new product, especially a chat app, that claims to be end-to-end encrypted really needs to show us the details of its protocol and stack, and ideally open source as many parts of that as possible. Does it use the Signal protocol? The site says "Squawk groups are invite-only and end-to-end encrypted." But which parts are E2E encrypted? The group membership? The message content? The message metadata? Everything?

Lastly, it would be great if you could add the app to Homebrew Cask, as it's my preferred way to download and manage apps on macOS.

1: https://gizmodo.com/zoom-accused-of-misrepresenting-security...

Glad to see we're not the only PTT fans out there.

1. Screen sharing is next on our list, it's the thing that we want most ourselves.

2. This is definitely not mobile optimized. It does work-ish on mobile phones, but it maintains long-lived webrtc connections so it's not ideal (we ensure these are not transmitting when muted, but we have a keep alive protocol which ensures they don't die, and would be harsh on mobile batteries).

3. Squawk uses webrtc, which is e2e encrypted by default. Additionally, we don't use any SFUs so we never have the audio unencrypted. All link negotiation and audio transmission are done entirely p2p and thus completely e2e encrypted.

Is there a plan for (at least self hosted) SFUs for firewall transversal? I imagine in some corporate environments that'll be necessary.

We have TURN servers setup for NAT traversal...but they don't terminate ssl like an SFU does.

That's great to hear. Having battled webrtc in the past it sounds like your team is doing a great job!

I don't think anyone ever truly wins the war against webrtc

I feel in the thread from feross lie some synergies. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23408831

We actually use simple-peer. feross is great, suggest having a look at his repos.

So I'd have this running and then anyone from work can just start talking to me and I'd hear it straight away?

That sounds like a nightmare to be honest. How will you ever reach any level of concentration this way? Even the thought that someone could just start talking to you would probably ruin your chances at getting in any sort of flow.

Also, it feels like only a small step away from a form of work surveillance. "Where were you? I was talking to you on Squawk".

Unless my assumptions of what this is are completely wrong. There isn't much to go on on the page.

Hey - the landing page is definitely in need of love.

Part of this is cultural (you wouldn't constantly shout at your colleague in person across the desk) but there are per-group and global mute buttons when you need peace and quiet. Everyone else can see that you're muted.

Think of it this way, if you are sitting in the office then anyone can come talk to you in your cube. I think it can be great app if you keep it running during fix hours like 3 hrs in the afternoon when anyone can come and ping. Rest of the time you dont have to keep it on.

Bingo.

think of it this way, most knowledge workers are finally free from being constantly interrupted by people who just feel like stopping by to chat, or don't really know or care that you're focusing on something. Now, there's a tool to bring that back!

<sarcasm>It's only like 15 minutes to get back on task after every single interruption. That won't hamper productivity at all. Much more important for me to get instant answers and boredom reduction whenever i feel like it. </sarcasm>

I get that. I have plenty of time where I zone out of Squawk. But there are definitely projects/periods where I need to constantly be checking in with a dozen people and various subsets of that dozen.

If that's not a problem you face, then Squawk is definitely the wrong tool for you.

> If that's not a problem you face, then Squawk is definitely the wrong tool for you.

Either that, or you are solving 'that problem' the wrong way.

Yeah don't use it if it's not right for you. I could see how this could be extremely useful in the right scenario. ( I will not be showing this to my boss).

Think of it this way, some enjoy chatting with people to take a break. Some enjoy posting comments on HN with <sarcasm> :)

Hi all - open beta of a tool we created for ourselves during lockdown. We got sick of trying to replicate the effortless comms we had in the office, and hated managing a half dozen always-on Zoom/Slack/etc calls. So we built Squawk.

Are you planning to open-source this? Will it become a paid product? Is it P2P or are you hosting it?

We're not planning to open source it. Some features down the road will become paid but the free version will always contain at the very least what you see today.

The heavy lifting is done P2P falling back to our TURN servers if NAT traversal is necessary.

That's good to know; you should put that information on the web site. Especially the part about the business model.

Another thing I'd like to know before considering downloading the app is system requirements. A lot of people aren't on the latest version of Windows/MacOS yet.

This seems cool. I'm curious -- did you try out TeamSpeak before building a custom tool?

I looked into TeamSpeak when searching for a multi-channel PTT tool a few weeks ago and couldn't find a way to listen to multiple channels and talk/reply to each channel individually. Does TeamSpeak support that?

I ended up having to compile from master what was a very recently merged feature to Mumble: https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble/pull/4011

EDIT: typo

When I saw the capitalized Teams in the heading, I was excited for a minute, because this would be a great add-on for Microsoft Teams. Alas it appears to be 'yet another thing to install and run in the background'.

Any plans to provide the functionality as an add-on for other communications apps?

Hey - we're looking at integrations with other apps, but the walled gardens make that difficult unfortunately.

I hear the frustration of downloading another thing - I've changed the landing page to make clear you can access in your browser at https://app.squawk.to

Sugestion: volume normalization, compression (as in audio effect, not as in zip). A lot of people have shitty mics or change their distance.