Google Meet, one of the market-leading products in meeting collaboration solutions for today’s distributed companies, recently got a major update. Google announced in a blog post that it would be introducing a Zoom-style gallery viewing experience that should be available for everyone by the end of April 2020. This new view will allow businesses to see up to 16 call participants on the same screen at once. Until now, you could only see four people on the screen at one time.
Zoom still has a much larger gallery view option, with the opportunity to see more participants than you can see on Meet, however. Zoom gives you the chance to see up to 49 people at once on Zoom. However, Google’s 16-people call grid will bring it ahead of Microsoft Teams’ own grid function, that only plans to allow people to see 9 participants at once.
Other Updates to the Google Meet Experience
As video meeting technology continues to gain popularity and traction in the current landscape, Google is doubling down on its efforts to provide more substantial collaboration experiences. Recently, the company also announced that Meet would allow users to present a single Chrome tab on video meetings, rather than showing your entire screen.
At the same time, Google is working on improving video quality for people with limited lighting and boosting audio quality to reduce exterior background noise. Google’s collection of new and upgraded features are rolling out slowly, with low-light mode appearing for mobile users straight away and arriving for web users one day in the future. You can also use the option to present on a single tab straight away, but background noise cancellation is only available for Enterprise G Suite and Enterprise Education users for now.
Encouraging Ongoing Growth
Similar to many other video conferencing services available today, Meet from Google has seen a significant growth in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. As more businesses are forced to adapt their working strategies and support employees from home, video meetings are becoming essential to productivity.
