The portals pick up sounds from their speakers/your speakers in the mic and sends it back to the other user causing an echo. Many other video chat products do this today, it really seems like a must have for a stand alone premium chat product.

Firstly, the portal (especially the portal tv) should try and cancel out sounds in my mic that come out of my speaker. Understandably that's difficult even though some other products manage to do this quite well.

Secondly, and likely easier, is to just filter out background sound better. If there's a tv in another room, the portal picks it up and jacks up the volume for people on the call. It's obnoxious. If it's background noise, then filter it out. I can't have a conversation if anyone else in my household is doing anything.

Especially the portal tv (receiver), it seems to echo the other users sound back to them and they hate it (sender is any portal product). I understand I can "fix" this by lowering my volume/disabling external speakers, but that's a ridiculous ask for a premium video chat product when I can just facetime for free and it doesn't have any of these problems.