Google has announced several new features for Meet to make its video meeting service more comfortable and secure.
After two years of confinement, teleworking has taken on an increasingly important place among workers who can take advantage of it. It must be said that this work from home has been made possible by the rise of virtual work lounges and video meeting services such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet.
This Friday, Google also announced many new features for its videoconferencing service. Google Meet will thus benefit from new functions related both to securing the meeting and to the comfort of the participants or the functions offered to express themselves.
The first of these new features, and probably the one offering the most comfort, is the possibility for participants in a Google Meet meeting to switch to “picture-in-picture”.
In concrete terms, the meeting will be reduced to a small Chrome window which will be displayed on top of other windows on your computer. You can therefore go about your business, participate in a Google Doc, fill in your agenda or move forward on a task in progress without losing sight of the meeting in which you are participating as well as the people speaking.
In the blog post presenting these new features, however, Google specifies that only four thumbnails of participants can be displayed simultaneously in the superimposed window. Within Google Drive, this integration of Meet meetings will be more advanced, since it will be possible to see the meeting participants in a dedicated column, to the right of the open working document.
Reactions shared easily and silently
In addition to this picture-in-picture mode, Google Meet will also add a feature to send reactions directly as part of its webcam. Like the reaction emojis that can be found in some instant messaging applications, it will be possible to choose from a selection of emojis (heart, thumbs up, applause, thumbs down, etc.) to display these reactions directly on video during a meeting. These reactions allow you to express yourself quickly without having to speak or express yourself in the text chat.
Finally, Google also announced the arrival of stronger client-side encryption for Google Meet meetings. This means that users who wish to do so will be able to encrypt video or text data from meetings. More advanced end-to-end encryption will arrive later this year.
These new features of Google Meet will be gradually rolled out starting next month. However, they will initially be reserved for customer users of the Google Workspace suite.
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