Two weeks ago we covered some new features that Google were rolling out to their video conferencing service. Now the rollout is complete and you’ll be able to start them all from within Gmail.
As Google Meet continues to grow by “roughly 3 million new users every day” they continue to improve it. Now the new changes should be accessible from your Gmail — they have been present in mine for a few days but they are rolling out to all users so you may or may not have this option just yet.
By clicking on “Start a meeting” a new window will open with a “unique and secure meeting” for you to join and then share with others. When you share the meeting the other parties will receive a unique code to enable them to join the meeting.
To join a meeting, funnily enough, you click on “Join a meeting” in Gmail and enter the unique code you have been given — or you can just follow the link in the invite you were sent.
Along with these changes there is now also a tiled view, AI Live Captioning to allow everyone to be able to follow the meeting along, and a low light mode which automatically adjusts your video to make you more visible to others.
Those who have used Google Meet and Zoom will know that Zoom is still along way ahead of Google Meeting in its feature-set but as Google continue to add them you can be sure that many users will make the switch given the Zoom security issues that have dominated the tech media in recent times.
Have you used both of these video conferencing apps? Which do you prefer? Or do you prefer another one such as Microsoft Teams?
I have 3 gmail accounts.
2 have Hangout chat features
the other actually does have the Meet option.
I cant seem to figure out how to activate it in the ones that dont