WATCH: Employee Prerecords Himself For Zoom Meeting
In the video above watch one ambitious man, Jesse Orrall, enter a video meeting for work as a pre-recorded bot just to see if his coworkers can tell.
Today, many of us are working from home and checking in with video chat. In some cases this means endless meetings where most of us sit, staring at the screen, feeling unproductive because we are not actually contributing anything.
Some of us might have thought of putting a cardboard cutout in front of the camera. Maybe a video of ourselves on a loop? But what about using a computer program that can do a bit more than that?
For his first meeting trying this on Jesse played a looped video of himself just looking at the camera and sipping coffee. No one called on him so no one suspected anything.
But the next meeting he knew he was going to be called on for a short presentation. So he prerecorded it. That short pitch was the easy part- what happens when he is asked questions?
Jesse thought of that too, he would simply click play on one of several general prerecorded responses. This meant a jump in the video as the new clip was played, but in today's live streaming world most of us have grown to expect video glitches like that.
He made sure to account for everything and anything, even including short reaction videos with smiling, laughing, and looking confused or interested in what someone else was saying.
His coworkers never suspected a thing. In fact, some of them carried on short conversations with the prerecorded clips.
If nothing else, this was a very interesting experiment. But there is no doubt he had to put in a lot of work to set this up. What we need next is an automated program that can sit in and react for us, so we can all sleep late.