Can better tech make video meetings less excruciating?

On most video conference calls, only one person gets to slotxo speak at a time. It's a deliberate, designed feature of platforms such as Zoom.

But as Susan D Blum's linguistic anthropology class found out, it makes having a natural conversation practically impossible.

"We always read transcripts out loud," she says, referring to her students at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. The class exercise involves reading different parts of a dialogue together, exactly as they were spoken. That means overlapping at the end of some sentences, just like in casual conversation.

The problem is that Zoom, and other tools like it, only amplify one speaker's voice at a time - a deliberate feature of these platforms.

"You literally cannot have this kind of conversational overlap," says Prof Blum. "[The transcript readings] never worked at all."

Many people trying to have real conversations remotely have also found that chatter just didn't flow as smoothly as it does in face-to-face discussions.

Remote working will likely remain in place for some time, at least to some extent. So, will the technology that facilitates working from home improve?

A spokeswoman for Zoom says the platform uses various innovations to help meetings flow well, including noise suppression technology that removes background sounds, such as typing and paper rustling, or even dogs barking, to improve the audio.