Your Zoom Calls Just Got a Huge Upgrade: The Insta360 Wave

[00:03] eight microphones, three speakers, a touchscreen, and kind of a webcam. Kind of. We'll get into that. But this is Insta3's newest product in their lineup of what we'll call productivity equipment. There are some things that it

[00:18] is very good at, and it has a couple things that are super innovative that some areas where I think it could use some improvement. I want you to know at the beginning of this video that this is sponsored by Insta3. Meaning before this

[00:31] They get to review it. And if there's things they don't like about it, it because the criticism I have about this device is something I reached out to Insta3 earlier and said this is something I'd have to include in my

[00:44] video. And they were actually super cool with it and said they appreciated the honesty, which is important to me in this video that I'd be completely honest said, let me tell you more about the Insta3 Wave and what this spaceship

[00:59] looking thing actually does. [Music]

[01:13] That is one of the cooler things I've seen. We'll get to that later. The Wave is what they're calling an AI speaker phone. Like I mentioned, it's got eight microphones, and four go around the sides in all directions, four go across

[01:25] speaker phone will have multi-directional microphones going in every direction, kind of creating a 2D plane of spatial listening across the room. Having that other set of mics up top gives the AI inside this a more

[01:38] vertical set of spatial data, so it can read the entire 3D space of the room remove noises a little bit better. And as we go through this, you'll kind of see that carrying across everything. a bunch of little optimizations to improve

[01:51] the entire speakerphone experience. Like the whole tall design and the whole like spaceship thing that it does. It's not just to look cool, but it's so that the ground that it ends up being behind laptop screens or behind other

[02:04] clear path from your voice into the microphone. It does also look cool, though. I I like showing this to people. One thing that heavily surprised me on this is how good it sounds. It has speakers here and here for stereo. And

[02:17] then under here, it's got I don't know if we can call it a woofer, but it's got a it's got a beefy boy speaker coming in underneath. It gives it a very clear and calls with this, and I've always been impressed with how clean the other voice

[02:30] comes in. I kind of wish Insta3 let you take two of these and like pair them together as a stereo pair cuz they are good enough to be desktop speakers. I just don't like hearing my music or my YouTube videos on my left side more than

[02:43] my right. And then that's that's never going to get old. And then we have the feature of this thing that makes it incredibly easy to use without having to on your phone. You can see right on the home screen there's a record button, a

[02:58] microphone button. But what do you mean by easy to use? Like it's a speaker I'm glad you asked. I've got a list here of five things that I think are standout features that I'm going to list to you in order of the most normal to the most,

[03:13] I don't know, wild, weird things I've seen a speaker phone do. You let me know and I will let you know what mine is at the end. Let's start with the one that's get used the most. And it's also pretty unique for a speaker phone. This thing

[03:26] has 32 gigs of storage built into it, meaning you don't have to connect it to anything to record. It can record over a thousand hours of MP3 voice audio on you just bring this into whatever room you're in. You turn it on, you hit

[03:40] session. Then you can have those recordings sync either wirelessly to Or if you don't want your voice recordings going into the internet, which I totally understand, you can put this in USB file transfer mode and just

[03:54] plug it in and transfer the files locally. But then what do you do with those recordings? Well, thing number two, you can have an AI transcribe and also summarize anything you record. So, you can read out your transcriptions or

[04:07] get a bolted list, nice, clean summary of what was talked about. As someone who listened to a voice recording after I recorded it, this is clutch. You can can summarize a Zoom call that you're on. I tested this with my wife. We had a

[04:21] whole conversation about the plot of solo leveling the anime and it not only separated the two different speakers in the transcription, but it was really accurate and also so was the summary feature number three because it's got

[04:34] eight microphones, it's got a ton of polar pattern options built into it. So front of it, turn it to cardioid or superc cardioid so it's really you're setting it between two people, set it in figure 8 mode. Or maybe you've

[04:48] got a ton of noise around you. Put it in AI noise reduction mode. Here we have some noise. We have a drill. We got an AC and we got a voice. How well can you hear me while this is spinning? Here we have the exact same drill spinning at

[05:01] the exact same speed. How do we sound now? How's the AI noise reduction? This is a good This is a good solid test. But you've got five polar patterns and an AI here. Number four. This was a little gem that I found in the features myself and

[05:14] I know it's going to come in clutch one day. But this has a reverse charging feature where you can plug your phone into this and juice your phone back up. That's just that's just convenient. Like they didn't have to add that, but

[05:26] someone just did and I'm here for it. And number five was wild when I saw it the Insta3 Link 2, you know it's got these pins on the bottom. And if you're like me and you've ever wondered what those pins were for, well,

[05:41] now you don't. There we go. Now you've added a together. When you're in a conference call and there are multiple people sitting around this, the microphones can tell where the speaker is sitting and it

[05:55] face that person and then start to track them. And it works really well, too. to make a lot of conference calls look like that 70s show if you remember that is one area that I'd like to see improved on the back end here. While

[06:11] this mic is optimized, it's great for Zoom calls, conference calls, more designed for large spaces, and computational audio versus the front of a person. I wouldn't recommend this for content creation. Let me give

[06:26] first, let's listen to the laptop microphone. You can get a pretty good were to be on a Zoom call and this is what they were listening to. How does this sound? Now, this is the Wave microphone set in superc cardioid mode,

[06:39] which is the right one because I'm directly in front of it. See how this different this would be than the laptop microphone.

[07:11] put in noise reduction mode has eight microphones all the way around it. None of them with that large diaphragm component. And it's going to sound a component. And it's going to sound a little bit more processed, but

[07:35] microphones using computational algorithms to detect all the different directions and process a very clean sound. But what are your thoughts? What Because even though I was blown away by the webcam integration, I think the one

[07:49] this with me to record something and then getting an AI summary real quick. brainstorming workflow. So check the links in the description down below if for all your productivity meetings, your Zoom calls, whatever you need. And if

[08:03] You should obviously like the video, subscribe if you haven't already for more tech videos like this. And as always, I'll see you guys in the next always, I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace. Happy streaming. be zooming

[08:15] one. Peace. Happy streaming. be zooming zoomed I don't know just be