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Communications Input Devices Microsoft

Skype Is Evaluating Adding Typing Suppression Feature 77

An anonymous reader writes "At a press event in Stockholm, Sweden today, Skype confirmed it is evaluating the addition of a typing suppression feature to its desktop clients that will automatically filter the sound of your fingers hitting the keys. Unfortunately, the Microsoft-owned company isn't ready to ship the functionality yet, despite it being available in the company's enterprise-focused Lync tool."
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Skype Is Evaluating Adding Typing Suppression Feature

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  • Clicker (Score:5, Funny)

    by royallthefourth ( 1564389 ) <royallthefourth@gmail.com> on Thursday November 14, 2013 @03:04PM (#45425528)

    Let's see how it deals with my IBM model M keyboard

    • Re:Clicker (Score:5, Funny)

      by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Thursday November 14, 2013 @03:07PM (#45425562) Journal
      No part of a computer 'deals with' a Model M. They are suffered to exist, by its grace; for it was forged in the ages before they were conceived of, and shall persist in the ages when they have been reduced to scrap.
      • Au contraire, I hear they can be destroyed by simply casting them into mount doom.

        • One does not 'simply' walk into Mordor...
          • One does not 'simply' walk into Mordor...

            Indeed, one must file six copies the B17XX44/3, signed by a Nazgûl. Each must be bound in a black folders, one marked "original" and all others marked "duplicate" although one must be in an orange binder and labeled "microbiology". A different Nazgûl must file each copy in halfling blood. Once approval is obtained, regular TPS reports must be filed until the trip is completed. Even then you must remain with your orc tour group, and most importantly keep track of your luggage! Losing, say, a m

      • I have a few of them at the steel mill where I work. Every so often we throw one of them in the electric arc furnace to clean the lint out of them.

    • Exactly my thoughts. My M will easily drown out the rest of a conversation. From my audio background, I also know that it's going to be a pain to actually cut. It has a wide frequency range, and the sound varies from when the key is struck - the Model M doesn't "click" so much as it "rattles quickly". I expect fast fingers will be able to easily overwhelm the software, but I'll be happy if I'm wrong.

    • by djbckr ( 673156 )
      I've had the pleasure of using a duplicate clicky keyboard [pckeyboard.com] for many years. Loved it, but frankly I type so much that the sound was just driving me crazy. I've tried many keyboards - from the MS Natural and everything down to the pathetic Dell keyboards (which I can't believe how bad they are). My new favorite keyboard: The Apple Keyboard [apple.com]. At first, it took a little getting used to, but it didn't take long. And of course it's for a Mac, which I use. But it's quiet, easy, and fast to type on. It doesn't feel
  • by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Thursday November 14, 2013 @03:06PM (#45425542) Journal

    The sound of typing tells you that the person on the other end is doing something. e.g. you call someone up with a question. They say "hold on, let me look that up". In this case, intermittant typing lets you know that something is happening. It's a lot better than dead air.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 14, 2013 @03:10PM (#45425586)

      Also you can tell if they are dome key typing pussies or if they belong to the glorious Model-M toting master race.

    • For that use, sure, it's fine. But everyone who's ever tried to use voice communications while playing a game has known that guy, who continuously pounds on his keyboard like it banged his wife, and who absolutely refuses to use a push-to-talk key.
    • by jfengel ( 409917 )

      It also lets you know when they're doing something when you think they're supposed to be listening. When you're complaining about your terrible break-up or going into tremendous depth about your accomplishments for the week during a business meeting, I'd just as soon you not realize that I'm searching out lolcats and sharing them on Facebook rather than listening to you drone on.

      • For some /.ers that's going to mean they have to do grunt suppression.

        • by jfengel ( 409917 )

          I could kind of use a click suppression. I'm not actually going to do any serious typing while you're talking, since I do at least need to listen closely enough to be able to go "uh huh... that's awful... good for you" at appropriate intervals. But a quick game of solitaire doesn't take all that much attention...

    • Lol!! Because that's what I want when I'm calling someone. Silence with a background of keyboard typing.

      As far as I can see, this will be another feature that can be disabled. No harm done here. Now I need them to add this to Team Speak 3 so I don't hear the other players bash their keyboards cause they're tired of me killing them.

    • We have a lot of people who absolutely refuse to believe that something as simple as waiting for a process to finish or rebooting will fix an issue, so when I get sucked into covering the Helldesk, I just run my fingers over the keyboard while waiting so the user thinks I'm doing some hardcore problem-fixing. It also helps keep them from getting impatiently as quickly because they think I'm doing something.

    • Not if they are using a decent mic - you wont hear something happening 2 foot away from your mouth.
    • by Malc ( 1751 )

      Everything's wrong with it! I was complaining to somebody just today about how shit Skype can be, whilst we were on a conference call and the person who was running it had dialled in via Skype. Laptops like to have the mic near the keyboard, and this person was talking notes and updating some documents at the same time as splitting our ear drums. Get a f*****g headset people, and everybody else: learn how to mute if you're not talking.

    • The sound of typing tells you that the person on the other end is doing something.

      And what's what wrong with it.

      "Uh-huh. Yeah. No, I'm listening. No, I'm not looking for porn."

    • Solved a related issue a couple of years where we wanted audible feedback on the keyboarded being types. The use case was a complete mute person Text-To-Speech (TTS) generator to talk over phone/VoIP (in this case it was Skype). Without being able to hear the keyboard clicks the receiver of the call gets long periods of silence while the "speaker" is typing the next word. This silence is confusing and often leads to interrupts from both parts, similar to the problems one gets with walkie talkies. By addi

  • Being able to hear the sounds of the keyboards allows us to accurately identify your typing patterns and tie the passwords used into the other metadata.

    • by Dracos ( 107777 )

      Not to worry, they won't filter out the keyboard noise until it's being sent from the server to the other person(s) on the call, so the NSA can still hear and analyze the keystrokes.

      • Not to worry, they won't filter out the keyboard noise until it's being sent from the server to the other person(s) on the call, so the NSA can still hear and analyze the keystrokes.

        good to hear.

  • Won't work (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Roadmaster ( 96317 ) on Thursday November 14, 2013 @03:07PM (#45425560) Homepage Journal

    It'll just lead to a lot of head-scratching and "can you repeat that" over weird, distorted-for-no-apparent-reason audio. At least I hope it works better than Google+'s "looks like you're typing, so I auto-muted you" feature, that one was a disaster for collaboration since the speaker couldn't go anywhere near the keyboard while talking. At least there's a way to say "don't mute me" now.

    • by gstoddart ( 321705 ) on Thursday November 14, 2013 @03:17PM (#45425670) Homepage

      And mouses too.

      Dude, are you still using one of the old fashioned steam powered mice with the big metal cogs or something? ;-)

      • And, of course, big brass balls.

  • by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Thursday November 14, 2013 @03:19PM (#45425682)

    And at the same time, the key-recognized and processed typing can directly be sent to the NSA.

    • And at the same time, the key-recognized and processed typing can directly be sent to the NSA.

      No need, since you've installed the client on your machine they likely have direct access to your keystrokes and can already send them.

      You really think Microsoft couldn't easily build this into the Skype client and remotely enable it upon request?

      • by cusco ( 717999 )

        Ten years ago? Sure. Today? It would take two or three programming groups, continually competing for resources, six project managers arguing over budgets, four executives dithering over whether to promote or sabotage the project, and six to eight months. Then it would crash or lock up the Skype client because no one dared hire enough testers to accommodate anything but default configurations.

      • by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Of course I meant that second machine you use for security. Sorry for being unclear. On the machine Skype runs on, all is lost of course.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Where's my Skype Suppression Keyboard? Preferably one that can do it in an area-denial fashion.

  • by jamesl ( 106902 ) on Thursday November 14, 2013 @03:26PM (#45425774)

    Unfortunately, the Microsoft-owned company isn't ready to ship the functionality yet, despite it being available in the company's enterprise-focused Lync tool.

    And we all know that once it works with one product, it's just a matter of waving the code over all the other products in the company's portfolio to make it work everywhere.

  • Why are they working on this kind of crap when they could instead be working to give us back the image sharing we used to have in MSN Messenger? I'm getting fed up of having to mess around with file transfers when all someone wants to do is show me their screenshot of an unexpected error for my diagnosis.

    • For tech support I find Teamviewer much more useful if that helps. It does have VoIP and video conferencing capability. refreshed passwords mean the helpees get a sense of security that you can't dial into their computer at will (though that's not hard to set up if your Mum trusts you like that). I believe you can even have them broadcast as a view only so you can't control their screen but you can put giant "click here" arrows where you need to.
  • How about maybe clean up my contacts list?

    How about you make it easier to search for people you know. Here's a fun experiment. Try setting up a relative on skype and then importing their contacts.. they don't use facebook? Well I'm glad they use mail.ru and rediff oh she's a bit more obscure than that.. well under "other" you can import contacts from 163.com and Fastmail.

    I'm the only person I've even known IRL who has ever used Fastmail. I loved the interface but the gmail storage space forced me out
  • WebRTC [webrtc.org] is the future of real-time video. As an example, check out vLine link [vline.com].
  • by MasaMuneCyrus ( 779918 ) on Friday November 15, 2013 @12:10AM (#45430051)

    I'd rather them work on an actual, functional background noise filter. Or at least filter out the noise of a loud laptop fan.

  • by tstur ( 38065 )

    Each iteration of Skype adds more features I don't want, makes the fundamental features harder to use, and bogs down the host device even further. It would behoove Skype to bear in mind that their revenue comes from people who pay for the VOIP capabilities and focus on making sure that actually works well. Also, don't make it so damn difficult to find the international rates.

  • by Hieronymus Howard ( 215725 ) on Friday November 15, 2013 @07:21AM (#45431711)

    Skype has been able to filter out the sound of cats purring for a long time now. I tell you that it's really useful when you're sitting in your island lair, plotting world domination, and issuing orders to your minions via Skype. The sound of the purring kitty on your lap is completely filtered by Skype. So when a suave British spy tries to infiltrate you, the minions can hear your voice loud and clear. I tell you, this is a great win for evil overlords everywhere.

  • I'm stuck on skype v4.0.0.8 because the latest linux skype client crashes literally every minute or so. And I'm not the only one who has this problem.

    • It's the one that's baked into the Nokia N9 (and sometimes I use the one baked into the N900). Hilariously, it's integrated into the OS at such a level that it acts like normal phone calls, and in that and other ways it's more seamless of an experience than on the platform Nokia now uses which Microsoft actually develops. Oh, the irony layered upon irony there . . .

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