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Comment by dudus | Hacker News Reader

MSFT Teams, Slack, Google Chat. Hate as much as you want but there's virtually no difference in terms of capabilities among these players.

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We started using Teams at work and its UI is awful compared to Discord. The worst thing is notifications -- by default you get a popup for every single message that somebody sends. So then you change the settings to only pop up when somebody @s you. Good luck getting all your coworkers to do that; 90% of the time you will get a message and then just not see it for an hour because Teams didn't prompt you.

Discord solved this. Small red icon on the dock icon indicating that there are messages in a server you haven't muted. The icon changes to a number if you got a ping or DM.

This is possible in teams by setting yourself to DND. You'll still see the icon in your dock but you won't get popup notifications.

Having said that I also prefer Discord, especially the drop in voice channels.

>MSFT Teams

>Allow users to enable push to talk in group meetings

>2021-06-01

>Thank you for your continued feedback, we have not forgotten about this ask. The feature remains on our backlog. We will share an update as soon as one is available.

>In the meantime, you can try using the keyboard shortcut to toggle mute (Ctrl+Shift+M)

It has 3400 votes since 2017(!)

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...

_____________

and yes, this feature is important because switching between apps just to mute/unmute yourself is terrible experience and

this problem has been solved like 2 decades ago or more with PUSH2TALK.

It makes gaming or even coding and streaming and talking while having people at home

(especially now, during WFH/pandemic) annoying as hell.

___________

The rest I didn't check.

Yeah I also find it really weird that push to talk only ever surfaces in gaming focused voice chat. It's useful for any situation with more than a couple of people, especially when they're typing while on the call.

I think corpos and normies are too polite to call someone out for heavy breathing at the microphone.

I remember during my days of wow raiding hearing someone else's background or breathing noise during the raid was not acceptable.

Still, how "corpos and normies" can stand kids as somebody's background? which is something normal during pandemic

The mute button works fine - if your mouse is free to click it, and the video window is foregrounded, and you don't need to interject at a moment's notice.

That doesn't work well for gamers, for obvious reasons.

> someone else's background or breathing noise

NVIDIA Broadcast (Previously called RTX Voice) is a godsend for those scenarios.

If you haven't seen it, it's worth checking out. It is absolutely magical. https://youtu.be/uWUHkCgslNE

Sadly, AFAIK, it does require an NVIDIA GPU, but it doesn't need an RTX card. I used it on my GTX 1070 and it worked wonderfully.

What's really amazing about it is that you can use it to filter incoming voice audio, so if you have someone in your channel that has tons of background noise or breathing, you can filter it out on your own side.

Why isn't a mute toggle a solution? I set up caps lock with autohotkey to be a mute toggle in Windows. It works well.

The only complaint with this is that if I'm running multiple voice chats at the same time then I need to use some other keybinds to mute individual applications. Still, for most users this would be more than adequate.

I think if you'd want to use other button than caps, then sometimes you may be not sure whether you're on or off

Anyway, I prefer mouse scroll button (mouse3) instead of caps

It actually overrides caps lock behavior so there's no light. It does mean that sometimes I don't know what state it is in. That's why a 2nd keybind to set it to only mute is helpful because it'll reset the state.

I use toggle mute a lot in Discord, especially on devices where I don't use a mic with a hardware mute, but Teams does not, as far as I have checked, have a customizable keybind for toggle mute that doesn't require you to have the application focused. Which is really annoying, especially when in a meeting and getting asked a question while in another window.

Ideally, Windows would give us a customizable keybind to mute your microphone globally. Sadly, that's not the case so you have to get a script to do it.

I haven't used Google Chat yet, but Teams and Slack just feel very sluggish on my slow-ish work ultrabook. Switching between chats or starting a call takes two seconds while Electron gobbles all CPU and RAM it can get. Discord on the other hand feels almost like a native app.

> Google Chat ... virtually no difference in terms of capabilities

Gchat has probably 10% of the features of Teams/Slack, and even those don't work. As an example, try to copy the link to a gchat thread.

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