The meeting room (should) have a much higher quality mic than an attendee's laptop. You want that mic.
Worse, when attendees use their mic, someone in the room asks a question, which remote viewers cannot/do not hear, because it is not picked up by the mic on the laptop. Or they join and don't mute, resulting in feedback loops.
I do feel the need for Google's feature though: the pandemic has meant a reduction in offices, so now we're ending up in "co-working" spaces, which — despite this being the bread and butter of the business — have in my experience alarmingly poor quality meeting rooms. To the extent that those present have given up on them. Literally, we were in one with no cabling. We asked the company for a cable, and they gave us a DP cable, but the room was HDMI. In these situations, yeah, nobody is going to want to waste the time trying to deal with getting the coworking space provider to deliver a quality product, and features like the one here help make up the difference.
I have literally never worked in a place with coworkers who understand VC tech well enough to understand what you're suggesting and who are diligent enough to actually do that. Getting that level of cognizance, over the entire seated body of a conference room, for the entire meeting, is unicorn territory IME.
The meeting room (should) have a much higher quality mic than an attendee's laptop. You want that mic.
Worse, when attendees use their mic, someone in the room asks a question, which remote viewers cannot/do not hear, because it is not picked up by the mic on the laptop. Or they join and don't mute, resulting in feedback loops.
I do feel the need for Google's feature though: the pandemic has meant a reduction in offices, so now we're ending up in "co-working" spaces, which — despite this being the bread and butter of the business — have in my experience alarmingly poor quality meeting rooms. To the extent that those present have given up on them. Literally, we were in one with no cabling. We asked the company for a cable, and they gave us a DP cable, but the room was HDMI. In these situations, yeah, nobody is going to want to waste the time trying to deal with getting the coworking space provider to deliver a quality product, and features like the one here help make up the difference.