In June this year, Google revealed a roadmap of upcoming features for its video conferencing service. According to the company’s latest blog post, two of the previously mentioned features will start rolling out as soon as next week. Both the Q&A and Polling features for Google Meet will be enabled by default starting October 8.
However, it might take up to two weeks to reach all eligible users. Notably, the G Suite Basic, G Suite for Education, and G Suite for Nonprofits customers are left out of these new features.
Q&A and Polling features will roll out next week to select Google Meet users
As of now, the Q&A and Polling features will be limited to G Suite Essentials, G Suite Business, G Suite Enterprise, and G Suite Enterprise for Education customers. With the Q&A feature, users can get their questions answered and also have a better engagement.
Users in the session can also upvote favorite questions, apart from just posting their own questions. However, meeting hosts and moderators can turn on/off the Q&A option. Another new feature coming out next week is Polls. Polling works in real-time and can be helpful both at work and in school.
The moderators will have the option to set up polls that are viewable only to themselves before the session begins. Each one of these polls can be enabled at any particular time during the call. Furthermore, the moderators can also restrict users from viewing the results of the polls they participate in.
More features will be added in the coming weeks
Once the session is completed, both the Q&A and polling data can be exported by the moderator. If not now, both these newly announced features could come to all GSuite users in the near future.
As mentioned earlier, Google Meet will also be getting Breakout Rooms, Hand Raising, and Meeting Attendance features in the coming weeks. A couple of weeks back, Google added a new UI showing a maximum of 49 participants at once. This feature is currently limited to the web, as it doesn’t make much sense on smaller screen sizes.
Another new option introduced last month is the background blur. The new option to turn on background blur will be present in the overflow menu at the bottom right corner of the screen. Interestingly, many of the Google Meet’s new features are already available on Zoom for several months.
