Google Meet to get blur background, polling and other features

 

Video conferencing platform Google Meet is all set to get some Zoom-like features soon. The company on Thursday announced that Meet would get a wide range of features including the blur background feature, support for Nest Hub Max, Q&A and polling. There are currently many video conferencing apps in the market including the Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams among others.

After making Google Meet free for all users, Google introduced a couple of features to take on Zoom. Now, the video conferencing app will let its users blur out the background or replace with a virtual background. Users can also select and upload a background picture of their choice. The company is rolling out the feature for the students and educators. The feature would be beneficial for the office-goers as well. For instance, if you have an important official meeting and you can hide the background or simply blur it out. The background blurring feature is available in both mobile and desktop versions.

Google Meet had introduced tiled layouts which enabled users to view 16 people at a time. Initially, only four people could be viewed at a time. But Now Google is working to add around 49 people to the viewing list.

Apart from the background blur feature, Meet is also coming with polling and Q&A features. The Polling feature would let the host and participants during a video call real-time surveys whereas the Q&A feature the participants in a call can ask questions without interrupting the conversation. There is also an interesting feature called the Hand Raising, which as the name suggests would let the participants raise their hands whenever they have something to say during a team meeting.

Just like offices, the Google Meet would also get Meeting Attendance feature, this would help the host in knowing who all and how many people have attended the meeting. Apart from this, there is a Breakout Rooms feature which would let the host split large meetings into smaller groups. So that the participants can continue simultaneous discussions and get back to the main meeting once their discussion is over. There will also be an additional moderator control which would let the host control the main operations of the app which includes presenting, joining, muting, and all.

Earlier, Google Meet had received the noise cancellation feature for the GSuite enterprise and G Suite enterprise for education users.