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Have you had enough Zoom meetings? Can’t stand another agonizing day of video calling, the only distraction from your rapidly aging face pinned to a corner of the screen like a dying insect? Well if so then boy have we got the app for you. Check out Zoom Escaper: a free web widget that lets you add a range of fake audio effects to your next Zoom call, giving you plenty of reasons to end the meeting and escape, while you can still.
You can choose between barking dogs, building noises, crying babies, or even more subtle effects like a choppy sound and unwanted echoes. Created by artist Sam Lavigne, Zoom Escaper is incredibly easy to use. All you have to do is download a free audio software called VB-Audio which routes your audio through the website, then change your audio input in Zoom from your microphone to VB-Audio and play around with the effects.
You can watch a video tutorial on how to set up Zoom Escaper and listen to a sample of the different sound effects here:
If you are using Zoom Escaper, you cannot actually hear the sound effects yourself. But I was able to test the functionality of the site with the help of my colleague, Edge editor-in-chief Chaim Gartenberg. Here is his take on the different effects that Zoom Escaper had to offer:
- Urination: “It sounds very wrong. Also, I’m not quite sure what the plan is for selling this as a reason to leave a call? “
- Construction: “Looks like you literally stood in the middle of a construction site. I think the sounds need to be a bit more muffled to sell it, but that’s fine.
- Crying man: “These are the sobs of a broken man. But who’s crying – is it your roommate, your partner?
- Bad connection: “This one works really well. Your audio is interrupted and interrupted. Stop the call. “
- Echo: “Extremely boring and very convincing. It looks like a broken Zoom connection. If anyone I was talking to had this, I would tell them to fix it. It wouldn’t be feasible to have a meeting with that.
- Wind: “If you tried not to work, I don’t know how you would convincingly sell high winds in your own office.”
- Dog: “It seems very real. It sounds like a dog barking outside, but maybe not the kind of thing you should be dealing with?
- Upset baby: “This baby looks pretty upset!” This is definitely something you should check out! Go take care of your baby!
Our opinion was that Upset Baby provided the most excusable reason for dropping a call, but also required people to believe you. have a baby. And if you’re willing to fake a kid’s existence so that you don’t go to Zoom meetings with your coworkers anymore, you might have bigger work problems than a few boring video meetings.
Zoom Escaper is not the first of Lavigne’s self-inflicted computer damage projects. His 2017 work The Good Life allowed users to sign up to receive 225,000 emails confiscated from Enron during its 2001 implosion, while Slow Hot Computer from 2016 is a website that … makes your computer slow and hot. “Use it at work to decrease your productivity,” says Lavigne.
If Zoom Escaper isn’t straightforward enough for you, there’s also Zoom Deleter, another of Lavigne’s creations. As he writes on his website, this is just a small program that runs in your menu bar or in the system tray: “It constantly checks for the presence of Zoom on your computer and, if found, immediately delete it.
Talk to The edgeLavigne describes the underlying philosophy of his art as follows: “Deliberate slowing down, reduction in productivity and production, self-sabotage, etc.” For request of The edge why these values were important to him, Lavigne did not respond.
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