Google Meet
Machine-generated captions
While the ubiquity of meeting room devices and one-touch joining has made meeting and collaboration easy for many, d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing Googlers still use supplemental accommodations to fully participate in meetings.
Closed captions for Meet has been a top request from d/HoH Googlers, but the technology to build a system of automated, real-time, speech-to-text was out of reach until only recently.
We partnered with Google Cloud and immediately began to prototype scenarios using their machine speech-to-text service
I developed a vision for closed captioning in meetings based on art history and a literature review. I guided the team of 7 SWEs with no particular accessibility experience in a sprint on the topic, centering the team’s perspective on the user.
Many of the features we build on Meet are Google-specific and remain unavailable to the general public.
In this case, the value was so widely applicable that we partnered with the Meet team to launch at Next 2019 to all G Suite customers under the name Live Captions. It has since been extended to provide real-time language translation and machine-generated meeting notes.
Meeting room touch screen
As part of Corp Eng’s efforts to support Cloud – and a 2017–2018 OKR to “use what we sell” — the decision was made to converge the legacy GVC system with the new Meet software. As part of that effort, I redesigned the meeting room touchscreen in advance of the Chromebox for Meetings hardware bundle launch. I secured buy-in from the Apps PA and developed new Meet UI patterns. The new design launched to all 12,000+ meeting rooms at Google and to 5,000+ G Suite Trusted Testers, who reported an 82% satisfaction rating.
The previous meeting room touchscreen left a lot of room for improvement
Results
A competitive product offering for external customers and an improved experience for Googlers
Customers save ~$1,400 USD per meeting room in integration costs by adopting the new touchscreen
“Without ever seeing [the interface] before, I was able to go and do everything I wanted intuitively”
“The touchscreen will help us to save a huge amount of money and overhead by reducing our telephony footprint”
Emergency alerting system
An April 2018 incident revealed that security alerts don’t always reach their intended audience. To address this gap, we partnered with Google’s physical security team to broadcast security alerts in campus meeting rooms.
An alert as shown during a security drill
Functionality
Visual banner on room main TV UI and touchscreen
Custom sound indicator and spoken announcement of the alert text
Integration with the legacy broadcasting system that alerts through email and SMS
Available in all room sizes and hardware configurations
Supported across all meeting scenarios: in and out of call, local presentation, livestream
Results
+18% increase in evacuation speed
100% Googler satisfaction (75% extremely, 25% moderately)
Zero reported issues with operator UI
Contact me for a full case study walkthrough.