Google recently rebranded their Hangouts Meet to Google Meet recently and have been adding features that other video conferencing products already have as quickly as possible as businesses transitioned to online meetings only. Now they have added more, this time some much sought after features.
Via their Cloud Blog today Google have outlined the new changes they have made to Google Meet in addition to the changes they made just last week.
The new features include a new tiled layout for larger calls to allow the user to see all participants in the call/meeting. The new tiled feature is limited to 16 participants in the web view whereas previously it was just four participants. Google have also promised more updates for larger meetings, better presentation layouts and support across more devices.
The new update also brings the ability to present higher-quality video content with audio by presenting a Chrome tab (instead of their window or entire screen). This Chrome tab sharing provides the best video and audio experience for remote viewers.
A new low light mode will use AI to automatically adjust your video to make you more visible to other participants. This is only available to mobile users at the moment but will be available to web users “in the future”.
Another feature that will be rolling out in the coming weeks is noise cancellation. Google Meet will “intelligently filter out background distractions” such as a dog barking or keyboard mashing as you take notes. Noise cancelling will arrive first for G Suite Enterprise and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers in the “coming weeks” starting with web users and later to mobile users.
Google also shared one of their success stories which they are apparently hearing every day as more and more businesses use Google Meet, along with pointing out their security features which are turned on by default and their continuing addition to them as well.
Google will of course continue to improve Meet to bring its features up to some kind of parity with other video meeting products such as Zoom. Whether it is too little too late remains to be seen but hopefully we can see these features trickle down into products everyday consumers use.
