Google Meet adds more shared experiences, multi-pinning

Source: Google

Google Meet's latest update brings a few useful features, including more live-sharing features and a way to stay focused on group calls. The app will now let you co-watch YouTube videos and play classic games (like UNO!™ Mobile, Kahoot!, or Heads Up!) with up to 100 friends and family members simultaneously. This feature is coming to both Android phones and tablets.

And if you're in a meeting where you need to pay attention to specific people, Google Meet now supports multi-pinning. As the name suggests, you can pin specific users so they stay at the top of your screen.

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Google begins Meet and Duo merger

Source: Google

Google has officially begun merging its two video chat apps into one. So, if you're seeing two Google Meet apps, you're not hallucinating. The company announced this merger in June. It plans to keep the Meet brand name while bringing the best code bases into the Google Duo app. According to Wired, we'll start seeing Duo's app and website branding swap over to Google Meet this week. As with other typical rollouts, it might come your way later than others. But Google expects to complete the rebrand by September.

For now, you will be seeing two apps labelled "Google Meet (original): The updated Meet app" and "Google Meet: The updated Duo app." Google will eventually put out the original app to pasture, but it's sticking around for now until Google develops the meeting feature on top of Google Duo.

Google Meet hosts can keep participants mics and cameras off

Google

Google Meet is getting a new feature that can help prevent distractions from noisy or unruly attendees. Hosts will get the option to turn off participants' microphones and cameras and prevent them from turning these back on. 

This mic and camera lock feature will be off by default, so hosts will need to turn this on during meetings if they want access to it. If the sessions have breakout rooms, the audio and video locks in the main will apply there. But it won't work the opposite way, meaning if the locks were implemented in the breakout rooms, they wouldn't apply outside of those sessions.

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Google Meet tests live translated captions for meetings in English

Google Meet wants to make it easier for those conducting video conferences with foreign clients, students, partners, and the like. The company is testing out live translated captions, which is an improvement from the standard live captions. The test is being conducted initially in meetings done in English with the ability to translate this into Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese.

This feature is also only available for meetings organized by Google Workspace Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Teaching & Learning Upgrade users. 

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