Have We Reached The End Of The Line For The Conference Call?

Transcript

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

We've put a man on the moon, harnessed the atom and built supercomputers that handle quadrillions of calculations per second. But try to get five people with telephones talking to each other and we're quickly exposed as technical klutzes. FRESH AIR Tech contributor, Alexis Madrigal, considers the conference call and how our communication with co-worker's has changed.

ALEXIS MADRIGAL, BYLINE: Every day, at 6:30 a.m., I join a conference call with colleagues on the East coast. I call an 800-number and then enter a six-digit conference room number, then a pin number. And despite the group remaining largely unchanged, once a week, something goes wrong. When I conference with outsiders, there's a problem every other call. There's the, oops, I got the wrong dial-in problem, there's the pin number is too long to remember problem, there's the is so and so on the line problem, and the someone hasn't muted the line and is a mouth breather problem.

MADRIGAL: Meetings are convened to bring people together, and yet our conference calls prevent communication as often as they enable it. So what's going on? Why hasn't some tech startup fix this? The key problem with conference calls is that they attempt to connect various telecom networks that have been built on top of the legacy phone network, which is as old as Alexander Graham Bell. We're all trying to hack this nearly century old system of communication to fit the needs of a world that wants everything to act like the Internet.

Work and work communication have changed in the gig economy too. Think about what it actually looks like these days. Some people are calling in via cell phones, other via traditional landline, still others through the Internet. Some in traditional offices, others in cars and coffee shops. And yet we expect everyone to connect smoothly because each can be reached via the 10-digit identifier we call a phone number.

In some ways, the conference call, for all its foibles, is a miracle in interoperability. It's like if you could send a message to an e-mail address, a Twitter user, a Facebook account and a MySpace page all with the same tool. The phone system is also not configured to pass along your identity easily. So while we might be able to log into a website using a Facebook account, when we call into a conference it doesn't tell the other people, oh, hey, Alexis just joined from Oakland. Instead participants have to verbally explain themselves.

That might have been OK in the past, but our expectations for these things have changed. On the Internet we are used to our communications being clearly heralded. Now, several startups are trying to change the way that conference calls work. They want to make it easier for people to join calls, and know who's on the line and someday perhaps kill the pin number. Two direct contenders are Uberconference and Speek, spelled with two Es, the latest in a long line of strange spelling decisions by startup companies. Both services do away with pin numbers if you want to, have full-featured mobile apps, can connect with document sharing sites like Evernote and Box and can easily integrate people dialing in from their computers or through Google+. Users can also choose to have the conference service call them on a landline or mobile phone and of course if you prefer, you can dial in the old way too. Our virtual meetings, though, don't have to revolve around telephone handset anymore. As our personal lives go, so do our work lives. We talk less on the phone now and text more because it gets the personal or professional job done. So now most of my work communications actually occur in an instant messaging tool called Slack, which allows us to meet and share ideas without having to pick up the phone. We can paste in links, photos, tweets and anything else we might want to remember and it automatically creates an archive and integrates with our calendar tool. Work has changed, it's more important to save our never-ending scroll of ideas than it is to hear the timbre of each other's voices.

But if we do need a more sensory experience, Google Hangouts allow for easy and simple video conferencing, providing a much richer interaction than one can get from voice calls alone. And though I think most people think they're a joke, there are so-called telepresence robots like the Vgo, a screen, microphone, camera and speakers mounted on a tall wheeled robot. Its maker claims it can see, hear, talk and move as if you were there.

But that these other options have not already replayed the traditional conference call is a testament to the one thing that conference calls are good at - interoperability. And not just between technical system but also between generations of people. While the youngest people I work with are fluent texters, the oldest prefer face-to-face communications. But we can all meet in the de-technologized zone of the conference call. Where one can use the latest Samsung or a rotary dial antiquity. And yet we are all equal in the eyes of the telephone network. And maybe that's worth something. Perhaps even the hassle of having to remember to un-mute your line when it's your turn to talk.

DAVIES: Alexis Madrigal is a visiting scholar at at Berkeley's Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society. And a senior editor at The Atlantic, where he edits the tech section of their website. Coming up, Milo Miles reviews a new punk Klezmer album. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.