Is this room ready?

The one word, in two places

Once a laptop is connected to your account, the app on it leads with a card of checks: one line per thing, each with a tick or a sentence, and a verdict line that reads either Ready or Not ready yet.

You get the same verdict without leaving your chair. Open the meeting and stay on its Dashboard: every room carries the same line, and above the list one sentence counts them, so a four-room meeting reads either All 4 rooms ready or 2 of 4 rooms need attention. The go-live step of the setup says the same sentence, so the last thing you read before you finish is the state of the whole meeting.

A room nobody has heard from yet does not read as fine. It reads as not known yet, which is the honest answer and the one that sends you to look.

The checks, and the fix for each

• The microphone. Whether this laptop has let Frasiey listen at all. If the permission box was never answered, or the answer was no, the card says so and the fix is to allow it and open Frasiey again. On a laptop an IT department manages the answer may be blocked rather than refused, which is a thing to find out days before, not minutes before.
• Hearing the room. Whether anybody has actually been heard through the microphone that is chosen. When nobody has, the line reads Frasiey cannot hear the room. Check the microphone is plugged in, then press Audio test below. Say a sentence near the microphone and watch it change.
• Getting ready. The first time a laptop captions anything it gets itself ready, which is about 300 MB, once, and the room is not ready until that finishes. On venue Wi-Fi it can take several minutes, which is the whole argument for doing it the day before.
• Reaching us. Whether the laptop is online. Venue networks that put a sign-in page in front of everything are the usual cause, and somebody has to accept that page on the laptop itself.
• A room of its own. Whether this laptop has been given a room yet. Until it has, it waits, because it does not know what it would be captioning. You pick the room in your dashboard, under Rooms & devices.
• Captions on, now. Whether captions are switched on for this meeting, and whether the times you set say they should be running at this moment. A room that is quiet because you asked it to be quiet says so rather than looking broken.
• Heard from recently. A laptop that has said nothing for a while reads as out of touch, and the line on the dashboard says This laptop has not been heard from for a while. Is it awake and online? Wiggle its trackpad first.

The card in the app shows every line at once, ticked or not, because somebody is standing in front of it with time to read. A room's line in your dashboard has space for one sentence, so it names the first thing that is wrong; fix that and the next one appears if there is one.

The test that settles it

The card also carries the room's QR square, and under it a line that is the best sixty seconds in the whole product: Scan this with your phone and say a sentence in the room. That round trip covers everything at once, because your own words came out of the room's microphone, through the laptop, and back onto a phone you are holding. Once you have seen that in a room, that room is ready.

Sending the link into a chat

Every room's line has Copy a line for the chat beside it. One press puts Live captions for this room: followed by that room's own link on your clipboard, ready to paste into the Zoom or Teams chat so the people at home read the same captions as the hall. If you want the captions inside the call itself as well, see Show captions in Zoom or Teams too.