Let’s back up. For more than a decade, I’ve hosted a monthly writers group for friends (no, you can’t join us). At first, we met at local restaurants — until each place banned us. In the end, we settled on a welcoming art gallery for our workshop sessions.
All was good until the pandemic blew in and relegated us to Zoom for more than a year. In that time, some members of our group moved farther away or had other good reasons not to return to in-person meetings, even after vaccines and the CDC gave us the green light to be in one another’s faces again.
We then decided to try a hybrid approach, and with our meager budget, that just meant borrowing someone’s laptop and broadcasting the meeting via Zoom for people who couldn’t be present in the flesh. But our laptop’s terrible speakers and even worse microphone, combined with Zoom’s audio wonkiness, turned our fiber-optic conversations into shouting matches.
Around that time, Wirecutter writer Brent Butterworth reviewed several Bluetooth speakerphones, and they seemed like they might solve my group’s audio problems. The two main benefits of a speakerphone over a laptop are the improved sound quality and — even more importantly — higher-quality microphones.
Many speakerphones, including the Emeet M3, the model I ended up buying, feature steering technology coupled with multiple microphones that focus the device’s attention in the direction of the person talking. The end result, for our group, was a drastic reduction of “What’d she say?” and “I can’t hear you.”
The Emeet M3 is small enough to fit in a backpack and weighs just under a pound. It connects to a laptop or smartphone via Bluetooth just like any Bluetooth speaker. Its four built-in microphones sense where the voice is coming from, and then it focuses on that person, switching pretty intelligently as different people speak.
