Changing Needs of Remote Teams & Growing Demand for Visual Collaboration Tools
Ramya Chatterjee
Now, working together no longer requires to be at the same place. The COVID-19 pandemic has made remote work a new normal of work and the right collaboration tools are helping organizations to keep their employees safe and workflow stable.
We started working from home mid-March and this sudden transition was not a major challenge for us because even as a distributed team, we use a host of collaboration tools, devices, and software to stay in-sync and collaborate on a daily basis. After six months of work from home, we are open to implement a hybrid work pattern.
To continue working at the home, office, or in a hybrid model, the right set of visual collaboration tools are needed to message, call, collaborate and share.
- An instant messaging app brings the entire team on a single platform to communicate either directly or via different channels.
- Video conferencing allows teams to collaborate virtually and screen sharing serves the purpose up to a certain extent.
- Visual collaboration offers video conferencing, screen sharing, content sharing, and digital whiteboard with smart tools to collaborate team members simultaneously on the shared screen.
A newly launched retrofit visual collaboration device called Thinker Connect supports the new hybrid workspace with flexible installation, intuitive user experience, and integrated features.
Thinker Connect is a retrofit solution for a standard display or TV or monitor that brings touch interactivity. Place the device on any monitor or screen and convert it into a perfect meeting room solution. It allows remote teams to join the meeting, has enterprise-level video conferencing with high-end audio and video features, and enables co-annotation on the shared screen across different devices.
With proven capabilities of Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning, Thinker Connect solves many challenges of effective collaboration while working in Hybrid Model.
Turn your display interactive to annotate: The advanced motion-sensing technology of EyeRIS® Sensor intelligently tracks the users’ pen gestures in real-time to perform touch interactivity on Thinker Connect, which enables seamless information control from any display. It gives freedom to write, draw, and annotate directly on the screen.
New Sound for Meeting: The most vital element of collaboration is the voice. Thinker Connect comes with a beamforming MEMS microphone array that has a pickup range of 5m with an omnidirectional response. The Voice Activity Detection (VAD) and Direction of Arrival (DOA) feature focus the microphone directly on the speaker and suppress the background noise with Full-duplex Acoustic Echo Cancellation (AEC). So, don’t worry about your kid playing in the same room, you will still be loud and clear to everyone.
Appear good in every meeting set up: The camera detects and identifies the participants, auto-tags the speakers, and frame them in a high-resolution screen. The 1080p camera ultra-wide-angle camera captures the participants irrespective of the place they sit, near of far from the table. The light optimizer in Thinker Connect captures participants in perfect light, even if you have joined the meeting from a dim-light room.
AI-powered Conversational UI: A virtual assistant that understands the intent of the user with dialogue management, and question-answer abilities have been incorporated into Thinker Connect. It is a conversational AI that has been developed using a powerful combination of AI and ML. With natural language processing technology, visual collaboration tools have developed conversational AI, which hears the conversation during collaboration and parses the information in the form of preparing automated MOM, scheduling meetings, and setting reminders.
Integrates well with all popular software:
Compatible with major collaboration software like Slack, Zoom, Teams, Trello, etc., Thinker Connect is good for home and office setup.
You can host and attend meetings via Zoom or Teams using Thinker Connect that offers HD audio and video, cross-platform messaging, content sharing capabilities.
Make a product development and design strategy on Miro using Thinker Connect that has easy-to-use tools and allows real-time collaboration on the shared canvas, without any lag.
While ideating over Thinker Connect, the foremost factors were portability, interactivity, and enterprise-level video conferencing. Large panels are surely an alternative to modern meeting room solution but its large size and skyrocketing price become a major issue. Rather, we look for a retrofit solution that could add value to our existing setup and developed Thinker Connect as the best meeting room solution.
We gained more confidence when the first lot of the device got diluted within three weeks of its launch and we were in a phase of the happy problem of ‘out of stock.’ With more and more companies adopting a hybrid workplace model in their system and policies, we are sure Thinker Connect is going to be the first choice of everyone.