The Group and Speaker camera mode on Cisco devices optimizes screen layouts to offer the best view and full room context during a meeting. Selecting Group and Speaker camera mode sends two views of the meeting room simultaneously to remote meeting participants: a group overview and a close-up of the active speaker. There need to be at least three people in the room for Group and Speaker mode.

To enable Group and Speaker mode on one of the supported devices:

  1. Open the Control Panel on the sending device. Tap Camera.

  2. Under Camera mode, select Group and Speaker.

Once enabled, you can open your self-view to see a composite PiP view of the active speaker and room overview.

Group and Speaker mode experience and support

In a Webex meeting the two streams appear as individual videos in the meeting layout.

For other meeting platforms supported on RoomOS devices, the two streams are composited into a single video, featuring the active speaker as the main video with a picture-in-picture (PiP) of the room overview in the bottom right corner.

If there’s no speaker in the room for a while, only the group overview will appear.

The following devices support sending two views with Group and Speaker camera mode:

  • Room Bar Pro
  • Board Pro G2
  • Room Kit Pro with Quad Camera, Room Kit EQ and EQX
  • Room 70D G2
  • MTR: Room Kit Pro, Room Kit EQ and EQX

On the receiving end, the Group and Speaker camera mode experience is as follows:

  • Webex: all RoomOS 11 enabled devices support viewing two streams. Webex app users and older cloud-registered devices will see the group overview stream only.
  • Other meeting platforms: receivers will see a composited single video stream with the active speaker as the main video and a PiP of the room overview.
  • MTR: in Microsoft Teams meetings, users will see the composited single video stream from the sending device. In Webex meetings in MTR mode, they will see both streams.
  • Receiver support is not available for participants joining meetings on Webex on iOS or Android, Webex on web, or WebRTC meetings such as Google Meet.

Known limitations

  • Cannot be used when Presenter Track is enabled. Read about disabling Presenter Track here.

You can read this article for information about other automatic camera modes.