Apple is more competitive with Zoom with its FaceTime service. Several new applications for the video calling app were announced at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference that kicked off yesterday.
The FaceTime update is one of the more prominent novelties in iOS 15, which Apple gave a foretaste at its WWDC. The new operating system for the iPhone will be released sometime in the fall.
FaceTime will soon offer users the option to schedule group calls and to send the participants an invitation via a so-called FaceTime link. It is important that users with an Android or Windows device can also participate in the meeting simply via their web browser. According to Apple, those conversations also remain end-to-end encrypted.
In addition, the iPhone camera’s portrait mode has been specially adapted for video calls, allowing you to blur the background to focus on yourself. The app also gets a new grid view to see all conversation partners simultaneously.
In addition, the sound has been improved: thanks to the spatial audio, the sound seems to come from the direction from which your conversation partner can be seen on the screen. You can also set the microphone in such a way that background noise is filtered out. As it’s called, voice isolation does its thing with the help of artificial intelligence and sounds promising during a demonstration at WWDC.
Another new feature in FaceTime is SharePlay. With this, you can, for example, listen to music from Apple Music with others, watch the same movie or TV show at the same time, or share your screen to watch the same app together. SharePlay works on iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers, and because all participants have the same playback controls in view, anyone can operate the play, pause, and fast-forward buttons.
SharePlay can also be used on the Apple TV media player. When you watch a series or movie on the big screen and share that content via FaceTime, SharePlay ensures that image and sound are synchronized for everyone. Content providers that will integrate SharePlay into their apps in the near future include Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Paramount+, TikTok and Twitch.
