​A smoother voice and video experience

We have spent the last few months focusing on three things: quality, quality, and quality! For those of you with the Google voice and video chat plugin installed, you have recently received an automatic update that contains:

  • A fix that reduces crashes on newer macs (Mac OS X v10.6.2 specifically)
  • A fix for webcam compatibility on Windows (including HP webcams)
  • Several fixes to increase plugin stability
  • Several fixes to the infrastructure used to set up and connect your video calls.

From users who have chosen to “Report quality statistics” in their chat settings, we can see a substantial increase in call connection rates and a big decrease in the call drop rate (see chart below). We hope that this will result in more enjoyable conversations with our software.

As with all software, working on improving quality is a never ending process, so we hope that you will continue to report any issues you have in our user forum, and we will continue to work on improving connection rates and call quality.

Thanks to all of you who use our service -- and especially those of you who report issues!

Posted by Jessan Hutchison-Quillian and Mikael Drugge
Software engineers

Permalink | Links to this post |