Next great thing for Conference Calls and Virtual Team Meetings

In my professional career, getting on conference calls has unfortunately become one of those constants in my day. Whether it be conference calls with clients, or internally, this has become a business de facto standard for getting people together to discuss a topic or coordinating efforts synchronously verses an asynchronous process such as emails or online chat.

There are tools to help with the virtual team meetings, such as GoToMeeting and Dimdim, that can help with visual tools to help move a meeting forward--the ability to share a screen, share a powerpoint or whiteboard, and certainly those things have helped evolve conference calls and make them more useful for team collaboration.

But one of the fundamental challenges that I see in conference calls has been what I would call the personal touch. When we meet in a large group setting in say a conference room, we take visual queues from individuals in terms of letting them know when we want to interject with a comment, or even more basically putting a name to a voice to know who is speaking at that time. Also conversation collisions are less likely because we can see who wants to talk or talk next and prioritize our own comments based on when we think it will most appropriately fit. These are all issues that I think most people face when they have conference calls, and in my estimation is what drive people to say, "it's worth me getting on a plane to travel to the location to avoid these pitfalls"--thus undermining the whole value of remote conference calls as a more efficient, time friendly, and certainly greener approach to facilitating this very basic and very necessary business function.

I propose that the next evolution of conference calls will bring the web into the fold but to facilitate a different medium. When you dial into a conference, you can simultanously log into a website that is unique for your conference instance. That web instance would be directly linked to your bridge, so just like most people have static bridges, the webpage would also have a static URL. Once the conference bridge is open, the webpage will allow you to log in.

When the user dials into the bridge, they will identify themselves and voice recognition will take a sample of their voice and store it. Once logged into the bridge, the user can load the webpage and user's can name themselves, and similar to say an online poker session, you'd have a picture of a conference table with each of the participants listed. As someone speaks, the voice recognition that originally was taken will recognize the person speaking, and relate them to the person on the webpage. This way all the participants who are in the conference can know who is speaking at any given time. Also there should be functionality so a person can "raise their hand" on the webpage to let others know that they have a question--if multiple people have a comment, they can weight their requests based on real-time interactions with each other, so they can yield to another person, or ask to go first.

My thinking is that this is perhaps the next evolution for conferences that will solve the age old issues that we all go through on conference calls. Who knows, it may happen!