Many teams are moving to a hybrid future, which means increasingly, we have group conversations with some teammates in-person and some remote. (For an in-depth look at the future of hybrid, especially multiplayer apps and presence, see Rajiv's recent piece on Future: Hybrid Anxiety and Hybrid Optimism.)
Same Room Setting
Selecting 'We're in the same room' prevents audio feedback on hybrid calls (i.e. when some participants are in-person and some are remote). For example, if Vivy selects "Same room" with Cyrus, then Vivy and Cyrus will not hear each others' audio, but other participants will hear them.
We suggest wearing headphones when in the same physical room. Tandem will remember this setting for the rest of the day.
You can also join a meeting in Same Room mode by right-clicking on a meeting participant.
In addition, Tandem may infer you're in-person (if you're on the same WiFi), and will show a suggestion prompt.
Find this on the Start Camera button in device settings. (Note: not recommended if you've disabled GPU acceleration)
Google Calendar Add-on
You can now add Tandem as a meeting option for yourself or your organization. You can meet with anyone—not just in your team—and they can join in-browser or download Tandem. Note: they won't be added to your team automatically, but if they're part of your org, they may be able to join your team (admins can control this in Settings > Preferences > Teams).
Notify-when-free: You can now get notified for teammates who are recently away (bright orange dot). Right click on a teammate to get notified when they're free.
in-call chat: added a red dot for unread messages.
Hide irrelevant rooms with an easy expander toggle ('more rooms')
clear unread waves after 24 hours
custom status will be published to all your teams (not just active team)
Bug Fixes and Infra
Infra for call reliability, scaling, and performance form the bulk of our efforts.
Call connection bug fixes
On Windows, better fallback logic for choosing audio and video devices.
Fixed screenshare from browser
Fixed bugs with Crosstalk (flexible large-group conversations) and
Fixed custom room background covers not showing up
Fixed /random broken on cross-team and cross-org calls
Need to talk with an offline teammate? No problem! Right click on their name, click "Notify me when free," and you'll get a handy reminder when they're next online and not in a call or scheduled meeting. You can then either talk to them directly or wave.
Infrastructure upgrades
The majority of our work at Tandem over the past 6 months has been on audio-video reliability, overall app reliability, and performance. Through a deep infrastructure upgrade that we may talk more publicly about in the future, we've reduced issues overall by roughly 3x.
Recently, though, we've received slightly more frequent reports of call issues and general app issues, and as we investigate we've found they're symptoms of new infrastructure upgrades - upgrades that, long-term, will make our calls significantly better.
It's a short-term setback. We don't want this to happen again, so here's what we're doing, and what you can do to help:
expanding our QA team
enhanced logging and telemetry to give us even more visibility on network-related issues.
continuing to grow our back-end and audio-video team (we're hiring!)
What you can do to help:
When there's a call issue, log a bug and describe from your experience what happened. This allows us to map the "genotype" (root cause) to the "phenotype" (user-experience).
During a callWhen you leave the call
2. Forgot to log feedback during the call? No problem: You can now log feedback from your last few calls by clicking the '?':
3. If you experience performance-related issues, please click the ? to send us a message, and include a screenshot of your activity monitor.
Over the next few months you should see increased stability in the app, more reliable and faster connect times, and improved video and screen share performance. Thank you for all your feedback - please keep sending it! We read every piece of feedback that comes to us with gratitude 🙏
Other updates:
fixes for "audio device is in use" issues by trying preferred device, then the default system device
fix for tooltip appearing behind call box
fix for clicking DM notif not taking you to DM
fix for dnd not triggering on startup
crash fixes
fix for intermittent call connection issues
full names for 50+ member teams
scroll correction for fewer mis-clicks
show fewer irrelevant teammates and rooms
control volume per-user (click on teammate's name during a call)
HD and bluetooth audio toggles (caret ^ in the mute button)
new auto-join teams behavior
meeting reminders with auto-join (see Settings > Meetings)
"Every company is a remote company." I said this on-stage at YC Demo Day in 2019, meaning that every company becomes distributed as it scales (multiple offices, travelers, working-from-home). I didn’t anticipate a global pandemic would make this plainly true. In weeks, Tandem usage jumped 30x...
...The blogosphere and media took note, adding Tandem and other newly launched Virtual Offices into roundups of "remote tools" and "collaboration tools." While not wrong, they failed to capture what makes the Virtual Office a distinct product category.
This post will cover the rise of the Virtual Office and how it transforms distributed work. I'll also unpack the key concept of Presence...
Clicking the caret on the microphone icon will show two new options:
Use Send HD Audio when you want crystal-clear audio, especially for music or other non-speech sounds.
Use Bluetooth Music Mode when you're co-working and listening to music with Bluetooth headphones. While muted, Tandem will disable your mic to enhance music quality.
By clicking on a teammate's name, you can also adjust their volume (this will only apply to you) — for that one co-worker you love who's just a little loud (or quiet).
Go to Settings > Meetings to turn this on (requires Google Calendar integration). A desktop reminder with will pop up before your next meeting.
Auto-Join
Clicking "Auto-Join" will hide the reminder and automatically join that meeting at its start time.
ProTip: You can choose "Remind me for all meetings" to surface these handy reminders and easy-join buttons for external meetings on other platforms like Meet and Zoom.
Setting to restrict teams to single sign on (Google) only - now you can keep your team secure and enforce restrictions like 2FA on your Tandem team
Ability to disable chat or enable "hear before accept" as a team-wide admin setting
New Meeting Settings page that teaches you the different meetings features available
Performance:
Small performance improvements during screenshare and background app usage
On Windows, turning off "Let my teammates know what I'm up to" and "Get on the same page" in Work App Sharing will give a performance improvement on slower machines
On Macbook Air (non-M1) machines, we automatically turn off GPU acceleration for improved performance
Other improvements
Fixed a bunch of minor bugs with in-call chat
New call data centers located in Japan (asia-northeast1), New York (us-east1), and Mumbai (asia-south1) for faster calls
Button to get an instant meeting link for meeting on Tandem
Support for multiple computers from the same user joining the call at the same time
Clear "waves" if you end up talking to the person
Lots of small fixes under the hood to call reliability and app usability
You can now get the Tandem Chrome Extension to schedule Tandem meetings directly within Google Calendar.
Teammates can join your meeting link from their calendar in one click!
We also have a few additional features to help you better collaborate during calls when you add our extension.
If you invite someone doesn't have Tandem yet installed, they'll be guided to download it when they click the link. You can also invite and meet with other Tandem teams!
Team Sections help you organize your teammates in different sections. When adding to a section those teammates will always be visible even if they join a room or meeting.
This is one of the many solutions to help large teams see the most relevant meetings, rooms, and people.
Creating a new section
Click on the [+] button in the Team section, then "Create new section".
Adding a teammate to a section
Right click on a teammate and move them to a section, or Add them to a new section.
