I’ve just witnessed a bunch of people using a high definition video conferencing system for the first time. It was only a single screen system, so not the fully fledged thing, but I noticed an interesting phenomena – telepresence voice.

We all recognise people’s telephone voice, so I was interested to see this move over to a telepresence system too.

One of the reasons that we have a telephone voice is that most phone calls are working at a reduced frequency range so we have to speak a bit clearer. When phone systems were first available people tended to speak loudly because they knew that someone was a long way away – and so you speak up.

The microphones on telepresence system are also high definition and will pick up a full spectrum of sound and yet the people in this call all spoke loudly and deliberately clearly.

The other thing they did was to treat it like a synchronous communication device where only one person can speak at a time. It was almost like they were talking to someone on a satellite phone waiting for the person on the other end to respond before continuing. It was definitely not a fully fledged conversation.

I wonder if it will change over time as they become more comfortable, or perhaps some of them will permanently have a Hyacinth voice.