Google has announced that G Suite users who configure Hangouts Meet can now add up to 50 users to a single conference call. This feature should be live for all G Suite Enterprise Edition administrators and users as of this writing, and should work automatically, without having to be turned on. Users can add in callers who dial in via a traditional voice connection, callers from Hangouts Dialer, and callers from the voice and video functions of the Hangouts app, all in the same call. It is worth noting that the original call has to be administered by a G Suite Enterprise Edition user in order to support up to 50 participants; a G Suite Enterprise Edition user cannot add support for 50 participants to an existing call just by jumping into it, and this change does not apply to Hangouts users outside of the G Suite Enterprise Edition crowd.
The new feature is part of a group of updates for Hangouts Meet that was announced at the end of October, alongside recording meetings and saving them to your Google Drive, and the ability to have participants in a Hangouts Meet session dial in from all types of sources, no matter what their geographic location at the time of the call is. With today’s announcement, all three of these features have officially rolled out to the Hangouts Meet platform.
Hangouts Meet was introduced recently alongside specialized hardware optimized for it. The hardware consists of a controller platform and a hi-resolution touch display, along with a 4K-ready camera setup, and costs $1,999. Even without the hardware setup, though, G Suite Enterprise Edition customers can deploy Hangouts Meet from mobile devices, Chrome OS devices, and traditional PCs, as the desktop version runs within Chrome, and the mobile version has a specially designed app for Android and iOS. Hangouts Meet is designed with telepresence and collaboration in mind, harnessing the video call function pulled from the consumer version of Hangouts and leveraging other new technologies and software blobs to optimize the platform to fit the needs of large organizations when it comes to arranging long-distance meetings and working together seamlessly.