Google is making its Meet video conferencing platform more competitive with a wide range of latest features. After making Google Meet free and available to all users, Google has announced a wide range of new features for the video conferencing platform. Aimed at individuals as well as enterprise users, Google Meet’s new features include all the ability to see more participants, polling, hand raising, and customisable backgrounds.
Support for Nest Hub Max: Google will soon roll out a Google Meet integration with its smart display speaker, Nest Hub Max. The integration means you can now join video conferences through the smart display speaker. Users can use the touch inputs or voice commands to join a session. The feature is currently available to G Suite users as an early access programme.
Background: Just like Zoom, you can now blur your background in a Google Meet video call. The company’s users also to add a custom image as the background as well.
More participants: Google will soon allow users to see up to 49 participants at once in a Meet video call. This will be an improvement over the current up to 16 participants. Overall, Google Meet supports meetings with up to 250 participants or a live stream with 100,000 in-domain viewers.
Other features: Google Meet will soon support hand raising in a video call. Hosts will also have a new attendance system to keep a check on who attended the meeting. Google is also working on a “Breakout” rooms concept where users can form smaller groups to follow up on a bigger video conference. Other interesting new features that are coming to Google Meet are Q&A and polling. There will also be new moderator controls for muting, presenting, and joining.
“To hear about what else we’re working on, tune into Google Cloud Next ‘20: On Air the week of July 21, when you’ll hear from Javier Soltero, Vice President and General Manager of G Suite, along with several of our product leaders. I’ll be there too, delivering a session on Meet that’ll provide more details on our product roadmap and our vision for the future of teamwork,” wrote Smita Hashim, Director of Product Management, G Suite, in a post.
