Score Your Business Meetings: I Usually Award Fs
December 10, 2020
COVID-19 made Zoom a necessary tool. YouTube and TikTok are filled with Zoom call mistakes from students pranking classes, pets interrupting calls, and people forgetting to wear pants. While Zoom inadvertently changed the way business meetings are conducted, it has not changed how boring they are. TechSpot reports that emotions might change when it comes to meetings because “Microsoft Patents Technology That Can ‘Score’ Meetings Based On Facial Expressions And Body Language.”
Technologists are already obsessed with sympathetic metadata, AI mining the Internet for emotional content, while YouTubers and other streamers are equally obsessed with positive feedback and gaining subscribers. Microsoft has combined both these trends into an “insight computer system” that relies on AI to interpret meeting participants and scores them. The scoring system takes body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and attendance numbers into consideration.
Business meetings are boring and usually do not augment productivity. Remote working has changed the game, because attendees can goof off more than when they are physically present. Microsoft designed the sentimental conference rating system to analyze participants and help businesses determine if a meeting was successful. It sounds more like a Orwellian monitoring tool:
“GeekWire notes that the company was criticized for enabling what appears to be workplace surveillance when it rolled out its “Productivity Score” feature in October. Wolfie Christl of the independent Cracked Labs digital research institute in Vienna, Austria, writes that it allows managers to see the “number of days an employee has been sending emails, using the chat, using ‘mentions’ in emails etc,” turning Microsoft 365 into a full-fledged workplace surveillance tool. Microsoft, of course, insists that Productivity Score does not spy on workers.”
Microsoft has reversed course, after asserting that its tools are not used to spy on people. Good to know. I score my most recent meeting an F.
Whitney Grace, December 10, 2020
Comments
-
- Subscribe to Beyond Search
Feature archive
News archive
-
