With the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions easing over time, many employees are no longer working solely at home. Instead, the hybrid model of allowing employees to work both on-site and remote is becoming more common than ever. In fact, a recent McKinsey survey reported that 9 out of 10 organizations will continue to enforce the hybrid model because they saw an increase in productivity and customer satisfaction. Gone are the days of being restricted to work at a single location; today, work is all about being flexible and finding a balance in maintaining productivity despite the ongoing pandemic.

Needless to say, with the hybrid model in full swing comes the necessity of hybrid meetings. Since communication in the workplace is still an important part of a company’s success, it is essential for the employees working at home to stay connected and up to date with those in the office, and vice versa. Hybrid meetings, however, are more complex in the sense that they’re easy to do, but hard to execute well. Since these meetings involve the participation of both remote and in-office workers, it can be difficult for distant participants to properly see and communicate with those that are on-site. Without the proper preparation and right set-up, hybrid meetings can suffer from various problems such as miscommunication, visibility issue, and reduced engagement.

That’s why here at AVer Information Inc. we have developed Smart Gallery, an AI technology, to solve this problem. To understand how, just keep on reading!

Smart Gallery is an AI-powered technology that utilizes compatible hardware to create an immersive meeting experience with seamless communication and visibility despite two parties being at different locations. This latest innovation uses AI face-and-body detection technology to identify every person in the room and display them as individual feeds in one of the two modes: headshot or half-body. In other words, Smart Gallery will crop each participant that are gathered on-site and display them as separate tiles on the video stream, giving remote workers a clear view of everybody even when they’re not physically there.

In addition, Smart Gallery functions in full automation, meaning it can automatically add and remove the number of individual tiles that appear on the video stream when people enter and leave the conference room. It also has automatic viewing angle adjustment, meaning there is no need for someone to be constantly repositioning the camera or managing the room settings. Regardless of where you’re sitting in the room, this AI technology will make sure everybody is displayed properly and equally. By using AVer’s built-in PTZApp 2 software and any compatible cloud-based VC apps, Smart Gallery can ensure hybrid meetings to be just as effective as traditional ones.

At this point you might be thinking, well, this is great and all but why is this relevant today? Back when the pandemic first started, almost everyone participated in virtual meetings remotely, meaning people was in a similar or equal setting in terms of meeting experience. However, when social distancing restrictions were eased and people were allowed to go back in the office, many companies still gave their employees the option of working from home, leading to the current hybrid model.

By incorporating an AI technology solution like Smart Gallery, remote workers will be able to pick up important communication cues like facial expressions, and body language and gestures. This allows not only the distant participants to feel more connected, but also prevents unnecessary confusion on who is speaking or what the speaker is trying to express. Furthermore, by ensuring everybody has equal representation in a virtual meeting, it’d make remote workers feel more encouraged to speak up and actively participate in the meeting discussion, leading to an overall more effective collaboration. With the rise of hybrid workplace being more prominent than ever, hybrid meetings are also now an inevitable part of our “new norm”, and it’s especially important that we adapt to this change to ensure productivity is not affected.

To explore the various camera options that feature Smart Gallery, check out the followings: CAM520 Pro2, VC520 Pro2, CAM550, VB342 Pro, VC550.