Daily Dose of English 2
Video Calls
Daily Dose of English 2
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to A Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today, because in this episode, we're going to be talking about video calls. Video calls. Calling people, not on the phone, but with video. But first, I want to ask you how you are. How was your day? I obviously can't hear you, so I'll talk a little bit about mine. I had a good day, generally, it was pretty normal, just a regular Friday that I'm recording this on, and it was really nice. I worked, I went out and bought a few things, I had a good lunch, and I got a lot of stuff done, so really nothing to report, just a normal day, feeling good, and I'm excited for the weekend. But now I want to talk about video calls. I video call pretty often, in fact, I pretty much never do a normal call, it's almost always video calls instead of normal calls. Or I guess actually for work, very often we have calls that are on platforms like Google Meets but without video, so it is like a normal call but on the computer. I'm not really counting that, I'm thinking of like when I'm on my phone talking to somebody in that way. And the people that I mostly talk to are my parents and my grandparents, my grandmas. Because I've sort of set up this little habit where I call them once a week, every week at about the same time, and we have a chat for 10, 15 minutes, whatever it is, and I think it's been a really beneficial habit for me, and for them, really more, I think is the more important part, is they really enjoy chatting with me once a week and seeing me and saying hi. And I think that's one of the real benefits of this new modern technology that allows us to do that, to have a face-to-face conversation from anywhere in the world at any time. It's pretty incredible, the ability to just do that, people, I don't know, 40 years ago would have thought that would be impossible, but here we are and we're even starting to explore even more immersive technologies for that sort of conversation. But for me, a normal video call is more than enough. It's really nice to be able to see people's facial expressions or show them around and actually sort of feel like you're in the space with them, it's almost, you don't actually feel like you can reach out and touch them, but you do have that connection with somebody. And I think that's really nice. They can be a little bit weird, of course, it can be pretty awkward or it's hard to hang up, but generally they're really a lot more natural, I think, than if you're just talking on the phone. There's less cutting people off and trying to figure out what's going on in the conversation because you can actually use some body language. I used to enjoy doing video calls with my parents when I was living in New York. I was working in a restaurant, and when I would leave and walk home, I would have about a 15-ish minute walk from, no, not 15 minutes, it was less than that, but it wasn't too long. Whatever it was, I would call my parents and we'd chat while I was walking through the streets of New York. And it was a really fun version of a video call because, thanks to the modern technology, it was fast and snappy, it was quick, reliable connections, so I didn't feel like it was awkward and weird. But I got to talk to them while they were sitting at home when I was in the big city with lights behind me in the evening, and so it was a cool way to have a video call. If you've never had a video call with somebody while you're out in the world, it's actually kind of fun. It does feel different than if you're sitting on your couch and just talking to somebody. But the most common video calls I have are, like I said, actually on the computer, especially because of remote work, right, I don't live in the same city as any of my coworkers, and so the way that we talk to each other is on video, is on the computer. I actually have a slightly nicer setup for video calls. It's not a built-in webcam. I have a used camera that I use as my webcam and a slightly nicer microphone, and so that also makes the experience a little bit nicer. The reason I really wanted to do that was because a couple of years ago, right at the beginning of remote work and everybody being on Zoom all the time, I had an English student who was using her husband's setup, and he was a programmer and he always worked online and he had like a nice camera and a nice microphone, like they were probably $500 plus each at least, and I really noticed a huge difference, especially on like how nice it was to talk to her, because she was not only crisp and clear in the video, but the space behind her was really clean and there was good lighting and the audio was easy to listen to. I'm somebody who is really particular about audio. I really care about how quality audio is until I hope that you're enjoying this audio, but it really bothers me when somebody has terrible audio just because it almost hurts my ears. It's really difficult for my brain to process because there's like this extra layer of... It's kind of hard to explain, but it's like there's something crinkly in the background, like some paper or something making noise, which makes it a lot more difficult to focus and to hear the words that they're saying. Even if I can hear fine, I vastly prefer good audio, but audio is very important. That was one of the things that really struck me about her setup. One of the things that I noticed was the quality of the audio, and so I decided that I wanted to have better audio for my students, for my clients, and at this point now for my video calls and just in general, because I think it's an important thing. I also have that same expectation on my own side. I hate being in echoey rooms, rooms with a lot of echo, where you can hear your voice bounce off the wall and hit you. It hurts my ears, and so I try to keep things as un-echoey as possible, and actually in my last apartment, I hated talking in my bedroom because it was so echoey. I tried to be quiet as much as possible in my bedroom just because it would hurt my ears, and I never got around to being able to actually de-echo it, but thankfully this new place that I'm in doesn't have really any echo problems, and it's a lot more comfortable for my ears. I'm not sure if you actually have anything like that. If you understand what I mean by echo problems, I have some ear issues which could cause that to be more problematic for me, but I think it's a pretty universal thing that people don't like echoes in small spaces, so maybe I'm just crazy, but I'm not sure. Anyways, video calls are what I'm talking about, and the big ones that I use is actually still FaceTime, which is because it's the default one on iPhones, but I'm also trying to switch a little bit more to other options because they're usually just as fine, but one of the things that I found really amusing about FaceTime specifically was there are a couple of features where you can make shapes with your hands or do specific motions, and it will add an effect to the video call, and it's just a lot of fun to play around with, honestly. It adds no actual value to your conversation, but when you make a heart with your hands, when the hearts come out from your hands, it does sort of feel like you're doing a bit of a magic trick, and especially talking with my grandma, who is not as good with technology, we'll just leave it like that. She was very amused by it. She got a kick out of it, and she thought it was a really funny thing to happen, and so she definitely loves using the hearts, or if you put a thumbs up, it adds a whole bunch of thumbs up in the video, or two thumbs up at the same time, puts whole fireworks behind you, but it does require you to have a slightly newer device, I assume because there's some processing done on the computer itself, and so I think my parents can't do it, and so they always get jealous when I do it to sort of make fun of them, but anyways. And the last thing that is kind of fun about FaceTime is that I recently got an Apple TV. It was actually a gift to my mother for Christmas, but it was like a gift from work, and so she didn't really want it, because she doesn't have a use for it. She would never use an Apple TV, and so I was like, can I have it? She's like, yeah, I guess, if you want it. I'm like, great. And so I took it, and now you can actually use your phone camera, like the nice, the back camera, and have your TV screen be the thing that you see people on, so it makes it even more like you're in the room with them, and it's this extra sort of layer of video call immersion, but yeah, so that's how I generally interact with video calls. I think that's about enough for today. I don't think I need to go into it anymore, but thank you very much for being here. I hope that you enjoyed your daily dose of English, and I'll see you again tomorrow. Have a good one. Bye-bye.
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