Google announced that Meet is going to be getting some new features in the very near future, and if you’re a Zoom user, you may recognize them.
The biggest feature that Google Meet is adding is, customizable backgrounds. So you’ll be able to change up your background, instead of showing everyone a messy bedroom that you’re using as your home office. This has become super popular on Zoom since the pandemic started, and everyone was forced to use Zoom or another video service to keep in contact with friends and family.
Google is going to make it possible to blur out your background or use an image.
New moderator features are coming to Google Meet
Google is also going to be bringing in a bunch of other features, making it easier for people to run larger meetings. This is all due to the fact that many companies will be doing these online meetings with their staff for the foreseeable future.
Included in these changes is the ability to raise your hand. So that attendees are able to “raise their hands” when there’s a question or something to say. Instead of interrupting whoever is speaking.
Google is also bringing meeting attendance, so that there is a simple and easy way to see who attended the meeting.
Breakout rooms is also coming, which is going to make it easier for larger meetings to split into smaller groups. There’s going to be a new Q&A channel that the audience can use to ask questions without interrupting. Almost like the hand raising feature, but a bit easier to use.
There will also be additional moderator controls. Which include giving hosts controls for muting, presenting, joining and much more.
These features are mostly targeted at Education customers
Google is rolling these out to education customers first. But it does plan to roll them out to enterprise customers at some point as well. So that everyone using G Suite will be able to use these features.
There’s no timeline for when the features will be available, but it’ll likely be before the school year starts up again.
It does not look like Google has any plans to make this available to all users. Even though Google Meet is currently available for everyone – even non-G Suite customers. This was done because of the pandemic, so that there were more tools to use to get things done. This could change in the future though.