Zoom and Microsoft Teams are the most common platforms for organising an online meeting. Both try to improve the user experience by for example improving the sound quality by ignoring background sounds.
Laryngectomees, especially electrolarynx users, are aware of the limitations of voice recognition systems. Using online “assistants” like Alexa or responding over the telephone to a VR system can be difficult or impossible.
Now there is a challenge when using Zoom or Teams. By default they employ systems to “improve” sound quality by cutting out background noise and electrolarynx speech comes into this category. An EL user may find the others in a meeting only hear part of what they say.
Fortunately there is a way of overcoming this problem. Going into the sound settings menu it is possible to turn off these new features that are causing the problems . Look for options to ” reduce background” or similar descriptors.
Please get in touch if you encounter this problem and cannot resolve it.
