Google Plans To Combine Gmail With Google Meet

Google’s video conferencing app - Google Meet - is being upgraded and integrated with Gmail for its users to hold online meetings from their inboxes. 

In a recent blog post, Google expressed its sympathy towards those who are having to work from home; therefore, its Meet in Gmail would bring a new solution to the current issues of many remote workers.  

Google also revealed a preview of its upcoming integration, where the new feature is placed between the folders and Hangout Chat services being found on Gmail’s left-side toolbar. 

It may be wondered whether this new feature is available for all users or not. Google has confirmed that Meet in Gmail will be updated to all GSuite users in the next few weeks. At first, users can access the feature on the web version only because the mobile version will be rolled out in the late of this year.  

Additionally, Reuters reported that Google is developing another feature for its video conferencing app, which is a Zoom-like gallery view. 

Regarding Zoom’s original gallery view, it allows meeting participants to see thumbnails of at most 49 people. This feature might intrigue Google’s developers, then motivated them to create one with some changes.

In particular, Meet is planned to show the screen of up to 16 participants’ thumbnails, according to the report. Moreover, video quality is going to be improved in terms of dim lighting and filtering background noises like keyboard clicks or slamming doors. 

One interesting fact about this announcement is that it was publicized right after the spike in the usage of Hangouts Meet (Now Google Meet) had been reported. Particularly, Meet usage in March was recorded to be 25 times more than that in January.