Lip-reading doesn’t work well over video.

Writing for Fast Company, product designer Quinn Keast recently shared his frustrations with the now-mandatory ritual of the Zoom call.

“Video calls have always been a challenge for me,” Keast writes. “Lip-reading doesn’t work well over video, because lip-reading relies on a whole lot more visual information than just the lips, and video calls don’t carry the full visual and emotional bandwidth needed to read lips easily. So instead, I use a series of hacks or built-in tools to help me out by providing real-time speech-to-text.”

Keast goes on to describe a team-building exercise he did with his co-workers to let them in on the challenges he faces with these meetings.

“When we held our next product team sync, the whole team joined sans audio. We would all depend only on captions to follow the conversation.”

“This worked well until it didn’t,” he writes. “Within five minutes, the transcript lagged a good 5-10 seconds behind the conversation.”

He then describes the solutions the team came up with.