I work at a FAANG and have spent the last 5+ years building video conferencing tools. I hacked together a Chrome extension to fix my video colour. I planned to add more features: local recordings, on-device AI transcripts and summaries, and clean screenshots of screen shares. Then my company shut down our in-house tool and moved to Zoom. Around the same time, I joined a new team and had to onboard, which is when I realised I truly needed these features. In technical meetings, I often want to capture a screenshot of a shared screen or record a brief explanation that transcripts miss, with permission, of course.

With Zoom, I'm unable to do any of it because of Admin controls. Many AI notetakers exist, but few run locally, and wiring a Chrome plugin into Zoom is messy. These things are easy & possible, so it frustrates me every time I join a call.

What do you find painful about video conferencing? And if you could design a Zoom/Teams/Google Meet alternative from scratch, what would it do for you?