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	WebTrain

Audio Conferencing - VoIP

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WebTrain offers basic Voice over IP facilities allowing quality voice exchanges over the Internet.

WebTrain provides a VoIP implementation allowing effective voice quality presentations during live sessions without recurring to the use of the telephone.

Voice quality is excellent while delay and latency leave quite a bit to be desired (even on very fast connection speeds). The echo effect is very noticeable unless you utilize headphones and the delay limits sensibly the smoothness and spontaneity of one-to-one conversations.

These weaknesses do not represent a major negative factor in live conferences and presentations as in such events the rapid exchanges taking place in one-to-one conversations are almost non-existent.

For continuos presentation speeches, moderated Q&A in a formal setting, WebTrain offers nothing less than what is expected.

The quality of the audio signal is very good and each user can easily control speaker and microphone volume through easily identifiable controls.

It is not necessary for the participants in a session to press any button/key to talk as it is the presenter/moderator who determines who has the right to speak at any moment.

When the "microphone" is handed to a participant an icon representing a microphone is displayed next to his/her name in the participants list acknowledging the user that she has the right to speak.

Among the few limitations noted on this front is a relatively long delay on the delivery of the audio packets even on very fast Internet connections. (During one of the live demos I attended I was able to repeatedly measure a delay of over 3-4 seconds for each sentence I spoke to reach my counterpart.)

In most formal and well organized presentations this will not be a singificant problem as the presenter has long stretches of personal talk and then the microphone is handed out very formally to requesting attendees for questions at the end in a very controlled and paced process.

It is rather in informal exchanges that delay gets really in the way of a fluid conversation and restricts the amount of prompt interaction possible during such exchanges.

In all cases of audio delay is always recommended to utilize headphones to minimize loopback and Larsen effects and to avoid the annoying consequences of hearing one own's voice being echoed on the receiving end(s) of the conversation.

Advanced audio controls support the optimization of bandwidth consumption and audio performance particularly for users on slow dial-up lines.