Auto-unmute of audio beacon - based on user feedback

[jchudge]

Discussion thread posted below:

On Fri, Aug 30, 2024 at 7:36 PM user wrote:
Hello, my name is #######. I've been using Soundscape Community for a year now, and I think it's great. I would like to propose a feature that could make the app better. It's a feature already in Voice Vista, but I don't like the implementation. In Voice Vista, the feature is called Monitoring, but a name like that could confuse beginners. The monitoring feature creates a beacon that does not activate until the user is close to their destination. The way that Voice Vista implements Monitoring is that the user sets an audio beacon, and then they're prompted to set the distance when the beacon starts. I feel that this feature is a bit clunky. Instead I propose a Delayed Start switch button within the Audio Beacon menu in Settings. The user should turn the Delayed Start on or off. This delayed start should be a fixed distance, say 300 meters from the destination. That way there wouldn't be too many settings or prompts, or a separate button to start a delayed beacon within Choose Destination, Places Nearby, etc. I feel that this Delayed Start setting makes more sense because I'd rather have this setting on all the time or off all the time rather than a case-by-case basis. Also we don't need to update the tutorials since it's a beacon setting only. Thanks for your service for the past year, and I hope it stays around for many more years to come.
User

Sent from my iPhone

From: User
Sent: 31 August 2024 06:01
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Soundscape Feedback (iOS 18.0, iPhone16,2, en-GB, v1.1.3.24)

Let me expand on the Delayed Start idea that I proposed in the previous Email. I think the feature should be called "Auto-Unmute." This feature has to be an on-off switch button in the Beacon menu within Settings. So when Auto-Unmute is enabled, this is the behavior that I think the Beacon should perform. Let's say that you start a beacon within the Places Nearby, Choose Destination, etc. The beacon gets set up with the audio muted, and an announcement plays, "Auto-Unmute Enabled." This message plays after the announcement that the beacon has been set up. Meanwhile, the distance to the beacon should still stay on so that the user gets updates without the sound effect. Now once you reach within 300 meters of your destination, the sound effect unmutes automatically. If you decide to unmute the beacon manually before Auto-Unmute kicks in, the Auto-Unmute setting should be overridden. But when you mute the beacon, Auto-Unmute should be re-enabled. Of course, when Auto-Unmute is turned off in the beacon menu within Settings, the beacon should behave normally as in past versions of Soundscape. Thanks.

Reply on 16 Sep 2024
hi, many thanks for taking the time to write to us and my apologies for the time taken to get back to you. (I had filed your note but did not tag it and it was when responding to a question today I was reminded of it!)

Many thanks for your support of Soundscape Community and your idea of having a ‘delayed start or auto-unmute’ capability is an interesting one as it helped me recall a prototype we built while at Microsoft which looked at providing additional functions for the user to allow them to exercise greater control over the behaviour of one or more audio-beacons. The key use case as I recall was allowing the user, particularly when they were in an already familiar environment, the ability to know they have set their audio beacon on their destination but not having it ping all the time until they got there!

I will add your note to our backlog and discuss with the development team.

Once again, thank you for using Soundscape Community and for your improvement suggestions.

Kind regards,
Jarnail Chudge (on behalf of the Soundscape Community team.)

[JJGatchalian]

When I first proposed this feature back in September, I wanted the name of the feature to be "Auto-Unmute," but since I changed the name of "Enter Vicinity Distance" to "Audio Mute Distance," the name "Auto-Unmute" sounds too similar. If we end up putting this feature into the app, I feel it would be better to call it "Delayed Start" to avoid confusion.