Voiceroom: A More Social Alternative to Zoom
After four months of working in isolation, the initial novelty of video calling for every interaction starts to wear off.
Having every social moment at work — from one-on-ones to kitchen chats — replaced by a stream of people’s zoomed-in faces can have a significant mental and physical energy strain on humans.
This phenomenon, also known as “Zoom-fatigue,” is what motivated our Technical Lead, Hugo Wiledal to prototype Voiceroom.
Hey Hugo.
Hey.
How did you come up with Voiceroom?
As soon as Your Majesty switched to working remotely, it became immediately apparent that Zoom is for presentations, not for group conversations. One person has the floor while others have to pay attention and anticipate their turn to speak. It got me thinking about how you could enable people to have multiple conversations at the same time.
What was the idea behind Voiceroom?
I wanted to recreate the kitchen-table digitally — Everyone can still be all in one place, yet choose which conversation they want to be a part of. You can break off from the main group and have a side-conversation, while not losing out on other conversations around you.
What is your vision for Voiceroom?
With the potential rise in companies offering remote-first, I think Voiceroom could be used as a complement to traditional remote-meeting software. You could use it for your screen sharing scrum routine, but it also perfectly propels the after-work pub quiz and socially-distant birthday party. It doesn’t replace meeting a group in-person, but it brings some of that natural flow of conversation back.
Taking it further
All of us at Your Majesty got excited about the many possibilities of Voicerom applications. We got together and discussed different creative use cases for the product.
Below are a few highlights from our brainstorm:
1. For museums
There is something therapeutic about wandering in a museum and seeing groups of people appreciating art around the space. I’d love to take a friend to a Voiceroom-facilitated museum where we can navigate around, join groups of strangers looking at an art-piece and maybe even spark candid conversations.
— Georgios Athanassiadis, Managing Director
2. Digitizing children’s playgrounds
Unlike adults, children aren’t often experts at small talk. Most children who now live in quarantine have to interact with their friends via video calls where there isn’t much activity or conversation starters. This setup causes them to be frustrated and disinterested in online social activities. I’d love to see a Voiceroom-enabled online playground where a group of kids can hang out in pairs, trios, and explore around the virtual space. There, they can stumble on group activities prompts, children songs, workshop videos, and more.
— Viet Hoang, Senior Strategist
3. Remote karaoke-party
Imagine the joys of singing together from the comfort of your own homes. Voiceroom, quite literally, is the perfect platform for online karaoke. Each “room” can have a choice of song playing and participants can gather around to sing as loudly as they wish, capturing the vocal and visual essence just like IRL.
— Shiron Boots, HR & Studio Manager
4. Digital-only trade shows
As crowded spaces at large scale events become unimaginable in the near future, Voiceroom brings an opportunity to recreate the communal experience of trade shows in a borderless digital realm. The premise of trade shows is to gather people from an industry to discuss the latest and greatest. Such cohorts can easily be formed in the social Voiceroom environment, giving participants the choice to wander across different “booths”.
— Nishita Tamuly, Senior Strategist
5. Board games
One of the enjoyable aspects of playing social board games such as Scrabble or Dungeons and Dragons is the ability to seamlessly transition between groups and subgroups discussions. With Voiceroom, forming groups in the same virtual space are as easy as moving a cursor. You get the privacy required to discuss strategies but also the fun of checking other teams’ facial expressions and guessing their moves. A breakroom feature just doesn’t have the same social magic.
— Sheldon Lotter, Creative Director
6. Remote classrooms
One of the best experiences of being in a classroom is breaking out in groups to brainstorm and pitch your ideas. E-learning has a long way to go to measure up with the real-life caliber of learning together in a physical space. The ability to scatter and gather with ease in Voiceroom makes it an appealing solution to replicate classroom vibes.
— Anna Benson, Digital Producer
7. And, of course, pub quizzes
Mastering an online pub-quiz isn’t a simple task. One needs to not only come up with the questions and design the presentations but also keep the crowd engaged, entertained, and energized. Voiceroom can be the one platform where a quizmaster can use to pose questions, customize the look and feel of the space, its background music, and facilitate discrete group discussions.
“Finally, I don’t need to use three different applications to run my FLORIAN’S PUB-QUIZ BONANZA!”
— Florian Root, Digital Producer
What should we do next?
Do you have more ideas on how Voiceroom could be used to make video-conferencing more social and human?
Give it a spin at https://voiceroom.app and let us know by writing a comment, tweeting us to @yourmajestyco or sending us an email to hello@yourmajesty.co
Contributors
- Hugo Wiledal
- Nishita Tamuly
- Viet Hoang
- Georgios Athanassiadis
- The curious minds of Your Majesty
Your Majesty is a digital innovation firm that powers leading brands to create digital products and brand experiences.
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