How to answer with a speech bubble during a video call

A filter simulates speech bubbles for greeting, laughing or speaking during a meeting on Zoom or a video call on Skype or Meet. Here's how to activate it

Comic-shaped stickers to intervene with the microphone off in video conferences (image: Cameron Hunter) If the video conferences all seem the same and you feel the need for something a little out of the ordinary patterns, there is a plug-in for Zoom, Slack and Skype and Google Meet that adds comic stickers when you perform a certain gesture. In this way it will be possible to interact with the video call, attracting the attention of the other participants, even if the microphone is deactivated.

The idea comes from the Netflix engineer Cameron Hunter who created Meeting Gestures. If you make a greeting gesture with your hand, waving it from right to left, a balloon appears with the words “Hello”. The thumb up brings up the balloon with the word "Yes". A raised index finger will display a sticker asking you to ask a question and a laugh will show the onomatopoeic "ha ha ha ha".

"In video meetings it is a hassle to unmute the audio just to say a word , especially if someone else is talking. I've created a video filter that uses hand gestures to show comic-style messages. It's been pretty fun so far, ”writes Hunter on Twitter presenting his plug-in.

In video meetings it's a hassle to unmute just to say one word especially if someone else is speaking. I created a video lens that uses hand gestures to show comic-book style messages instead. So far it's been pretty fun! pic.twitter.com/wp6XO5QDQc

- Cameron Hunter (@cameronhunter) September 15, 2020



To build the augmented reality system, Hunter used Lens Studio by Snapchat thus managing to assign their respective meanings to 9 simple gestures in the form of a cartoon.