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Remote meetings have rapidly replaced encounters at workplaces and at recreational activities, since the corona pandemic has shut people up in their homes all around the world. Teams, Zoom, Skype and other video conferencing tools help you run your business, go to school, and stay in touch.

Aalto University's speech processing researchers want to find out how these communication technologies could be improved. The researchers are collecting via Twitter people's experiences of teleconferencing, carried out for example with video conferencing tools. The goal is to identify what problems application developers should focus on.

‘During the corona pandemic, communications play an important role, and I want to use my expertise to alleviate the impacts of the crisis. Increasing the amount of teleconferencing is also good for the environment, as it reduces business travel and increases remote work,’ says Professor Tom Bäckström, who is leading the research and is a specialist in sustainable voice communication technology.  

Participate via Twitter using the hashtag #telecoresearch

Are you disturbed by Skype's audio quality? Or do things get handled more efficiently in your video meetings? You can participate in the research on Twitter by using the tag above and sharing about what works well and what doesn’t work in video conferencing and telephone conferencing. The study is not limited to certain conferencing tools, nor is there a limit to the size of the remote meetings involved.

The responses will be analysed using statistical methods and sentiment analysis of positivity or negativity of the messages. The goal is to identify the strengths and also the areas for improvement in remote meetings and the related communication tools. The results of the study will be published both in an academic publication and also as blog posts for the general public.

Messages sent to the social networking service Twitter (tweets) are public information. Tweets are being collected for the study via the services provided by Twitter using the identifier #telecoresearch as well as other related identifiers. The tweets used as the research data will be stored and processed anonymously without any user data.