Everything you need to know to fully utilize your meeting experience

Google Meet is a video conferencing service from Google. It's a great solution for both individuals and businesses to meet on audio and video calls. Originally emerged from Google Hangouts, it now holds a larger audience share and boasts some unique features.

Anyone with a valid email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the features available such as simple scheduling and easy screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to the user’s preference, including an expanded tiled view. The interface is aimed at creating an engaging, safe, and people-focused video calling platform.

It's already tricky to find suitable team-chat and video conferencing tools, but researching Google's various options can be downright baffling. Does Google Hangouts still exist? What's the difference between Google Hangouts and Google Chat? What is Google Meet, and how is it different from Hangouts Video?
 

Hangouts Conference vs. Meet

Google is known for having multiple chat services that all seem to do the same thing. It often changes the name of services or retires them, which leads to even more confusion.

Google Hangouts is Google's longest-running messaging and video chat service. This service is only offered to consumer accounts, which is basically anyone with an @gmail.com or @googlemail.com email address.

Google Meet, previously named Google Hangouts Meet, is Google's premium video conferencing software, provided as part of Google Workspace (formerly G Suite). There's also a free version of Meet. The meet is similar to the video chat service provided in the consumer Hangouts but supports far more participants and is superior in quality.
 

Top utility features of Meet

This easy to use collaboration app supports over two million new users each day.

Users spend over 2 billion minutes together on the video conferencing app, equivalent to 3,800 years of meetings in a single day! Primarily used by businesses and officials to conduct meetings, it rapidly created its niche in education as Covid-19 caused a pivot to remote learning. Google Meet has been a stalwart of virtual gatherings, improving digital connectivity immensely.

Meet offers free video conferencing for up to 100 participants, beyond which it offers an enterprise segment and houses upto 250 participants. 

Some of the free Google Meet features to exploit in your upcoming meetings :

• Live captioning during meetings - Follow along in real-time with automated live captions powered by Google’s speech recognition technology. 
   
• Controls for meeting hosts - Anyone can easily pin, mute, or remove participants. For privacy reasons, you cannot unmute another person. Ask them to unmute their audio.
   
• Whiteboarding - Illustrate your ideas, write keywords, or add typed notes or images to your board. You may either select a previously stored whiteboard or create a new one that is shared with everyone in the session.
   
• Virtual Effects - Replace backgrounds to appear professional to your colleagues or clients while working from home. This versatile feature also allows the users to blur their current background or replace it with an image that helps them look more professional on video calls without worrying about the mess in the back.
   

Premium Meet features include: 

• Video Recording - Users can record their company meetings, conferences, Webinars etc on Google Meet. This feature is helpful to look back on what is discussed in the meeting. Webinars can be recorded and later on edited.
   
• Background Noise Cancellation - Working from home can sometimes be challenging with all the background noises. But not to worry, Google Meet’s G-suite has a feature for noise cancellation in the app. This feature cancels the background noises and helps users to have a clear conversation. So be it barking dogs, shouting kids, someone chewing loudly or any sort of noise, Meet takes care of it.
   
• Low Light Mode - The low light mode enhances the video's visibility using AI technology. Now you don’t need to worry much about the room's lighting because Google got it covered for you.
   
• Polls - Google Meet has made the decision making process a bit simpler. With the fantastic feature of Polls, all the members in the Meet can choose what would be a great decision according to them. The meeting host will get the poll results with the person's name and their vote. 
   
• Whiteboard - Brainstorm meetings are evaluated well if all the points are written down for references. The Whiteboard feature gives a boost to your creativity. Write, draw a shape, add sticky notes, upload photos, and laser point the important points.
   
• Translate - Live Translation comes across as a great feature in multilingual meetings. The Live translate option helps to translate the client's native language with English subtitles.
   
• Attendance tracking - Moderators can get a report on who attended their video calls and live streams.
   
• Breakout rooms - This creates one or more separate video calls within the main video call, where each group cannot see or hear the other groups. 
   

Gain a richer experience of Meet through QuickMinutes

Scheduling a Google Meet conference through QuickMinutes improves the meeting experience by multiple folds. The combination boasts a feature-rich experience and facilitates the meetings to be truly immersive, inclusive and productive.

• Steer your meetings with a published Agenda - Draft a meeting agenda before every conference and have it circulated among your attendees. Choose from the range of relevant templates provided in the software or customize your own templates and save them for recurring meetings. The attendees can refer to the published agenda and be on the track during the meeting.
   
• Meetspace - Centralize all meeting documentation in one common place. Take real-time minutes, assign person-specific action items and log key takeaways. Meetspace serves as the go-to solution for all the meeting-related resources.
   
• Attendance tracker - Get an automatic record of the meeting members for each meeting. The attendance recorder takes into account the registered apologies and meeting attendees and logs it in the Minutes document.

Empower your team by building great meeting habits through collaborative agendas and real-time minutes-taking. Life happens, scattered meetings don’t have to!