If Zoom has achieved something, it is to expose many video call apps. It is not that the alternatives of Google, Microsoft and Facebook are bad; is that just when we most needed a video call app, most people did not choose them.
That has caused that in the last weeks these alternatives have received many improvements, both to catch up with Zoom and to surpass it in many aspects.
The latest is Google Meet, Google’s video calling service that not long ago added integration with Gmail. Google also announced that it was going to implement more news “soon”, and just today they have just arrived.
The main difference we will see when organizing video calls in large groups; Meet now supports 16 users in the same meeting. To achieve this, he has also copied one of the best things about Zoom, the grid division of the screen, assigning a space to each user.
In this way, we can see all the users participating in the video call at the same time, and not dynamically with four people as it is done by default in Meet. Using large screens is recommended in these cases, although that will not be a problem if we are teleworking.
It is no secret that this update is intended for those who are telecommuting through the confinement of COVID-19. Another very interesting novelty is the possibility of “presenting a Chrome tab”; In other words, it allows us to choose a Chrome tab and share it with everyone present at the meeting. In this way we do not have to share the entire screen, as usual.
Google Meet now also has integrated noise reduction; thus, it will be able to filter the background noises in our calls automatically, so that only our voice is heard.
The update is already coming to G Suite users, although these developments are expected to arrive gradually over the next few weeks.
Source: Google Blog
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