Owl LabsMeeting Owl - 360 Degree, 720p Video Conference Camera, Microphone, and Speaker (Automatic Speaker Focus, Perfect for Huddle Rooms), Black

I work for a company with about 26K employees, where infrastructure is pretty locked down but we realize that "digital is coming" and that we have to be more flexible. My review is really for the corporate IT department trying to figure out what the heck this thing is, is it a security risk, and where do we go from here.First, we wanted to know that this can be used in fully stand alone mode-- USB only-- as a webcam. It can. Internet is not absolutely required, it does work with Pixelbook and Chromebooks, it does work with Windows 10 with no additional manual driver loads required.IT does do what it claims, scanning the room, identifying humans, making them the center of the video when they are speaking as you would expect from a very large, very expensive video conferencing system. The video quality was "good" but I wouldn't call it exceptional.Next: Firmware updates. Yes it does require some kind of wifi based internet connection and a smart phone app to initiate firmware updates. At this point we have users using their smart phone as a mobile hotspot to manage firmware updates. We don't allow unauthenticated devices without MDM on our wireless network today, so this was the most logical short term workaround.Next: Can it be secured? Not really. I thought it was running Android, haven't been able to confirm what OS is on it.Finally: The Registration: This is probably the part that, at first was the most concerning from a corporate IT perspective. It has its own cloud based utilization/ status/ statistics gathering program that allows anyone with a corporate email address who registers a unit to see all of the other units in the environment. I discovered that we had two other units registered. In reality a person could register the unit on a personal email account and we'd never know about it, etc. This is the murky part that we haven't fully settled in on.As of now the units are still allowed for use and we haven't made any clear conclusions on starting up an IoT type dedicated SSID, though this is not the only product driving that kind of decision it's certainly one of them.The device does accomplish it's goal of making a remote worker feel more part of the team and for that, there were few to no other prefect alternatives.

We tried many different ways to record the audio of the meeting. Local, remote, cloud, but none is a good quality.The audio quality is fair enough to listen to people during the meeting but we were expecting very good recording quality for speech recognition. This is not the case.

I bought this for a conference room in my home. I do a lot of work from home and wanted to be able to have a good camera for Zoom calls with a small group around my conference table. I learned about the Meeting Owl from being on the receiving end of a call with several people around a table. The sound quality was great and I was quite impressed with the device's ability to focus the camera on the person speaking, coupled with the full "panorama" view of the room from the middle of the table. I called the host of that meeting to learn what they were using and discovered the Owl. I was about to buy a more traditional camera / audio system but I liked the functionality of the Owl. The bonus is that it cost a bit less than what was I considering. Net net, I'm very happy with the device. It works great, picture and sound quality are excellent, and it connects easily to my MBP. I've been using it on and off for about a month and so far, I have not found any gotchas.

I bought the MO after having articles forwarded to me from (2) different people in the same day about it and then gettting inundated with social media ads... so good news for the Meeting Owl marketing team, your marketing worked.We do morning "Huddles" where we have approximately 20 people in one room and a few other people remotely video conferencing in. We use mainly Chrome OS with Zoom running in a web browser. Our normal setup is a wide view camera on the top of a TV at one end of the room. The room is fairly large, approximately 25-30 feet long and 15 feet wide.We tested it with a huddle this morning and overall it worked well -- some takeaways so far:* It definitely has a "cool" factor -- people found themselves staring at the screen to see if it noticed they were speaking... we dubbed it "Witchcraft" :)* The speed at which is detects who is speaking can vary -- sometimes it picks them up right away, sometimes it is a little slower to respond. My guess is it is trying to decipher between someone making rustling noises with paper (ie: not important sounds) vs. important sounds like speaking.* Our room is large -- the remote users noted that the audio was similar to the high end video conference microphone we normally used -- which was an original concern of mine.* Since our room is so large, one comment is that the people tend to have a lot of "white space" around them -- it would be nice if the Owl could zoom in on them, even digitally, to make them look larger... possibly there could be a setting for the type of meeting (small/medium/large room and if people are sitting or standing, or distance most people are from camera, etc). When sitting I don't think this would be as much an issue as when we stand for our huddles. I'm not sure if the resolution of the camera currently is high enough to support this.* The remote users noted it was an improvement to be able to see the face of the person speaking. Normally they have to guess who is speaking based upon recognizing the voice.* We had a few minor glitches... there was one situation where my body was directly on a split and MO would not center on me. I could see my left and right arms but the middle of my body was on the camera split. I made sure to talk directly at it was not able to pick up.* The full room view is not very useful when having a large conference (huddle) type setup -- the remote users considered it more "gimmicky" and not effective as it was too small. It also takes up the screen real-estate and so the direct shots of people are smaller. Two options: A) It would be nice to have the option in the app to turn that feature off. B) It would be cool if it could "auto turn off" if someone within the same room was not speaking. For example if only a remote person was speaking, show the full room, but once someone within the room is speaking then show only the large views of people (and get rid of the panorama) as it is not as relevant. This may be tough as you would have to figure out how MO could determine the difference between a speaker and the TV [Maybe the app would allow defining the location of the TV in the setup to aid MO in this].* Along with having an app to change settings -- I may have a number of staff using the device and not be connected to MO for settings. It would be cool to have mini QR code cards (think index card type things) that we could hold up to the MO camera to change settings. If my team wanted to turn the Panorama on/off, they could just hold up a QR code to the MO and it would change the setting instantly. We don't want people fumbling with their phones or having to "connect" it if they have not already. [Feel free to send me a free MO if you use that idea LOL]* One unintended side effect: The MO makes me much more aware of the bald spot on the back of my head... I can now see it when I look at the TV. :)