Google Meet has a new update, and it gets plenty of AI to make what Google claims will be an easier and more seamless user interface. The latest update was announced yesterday, and most of the new features will be available to use for all users and not just Google’s array of paid enterprise users. Some of the updates that were announced are also continuations of improvements that Google had already rolled out to Meet in the past, and are now either being brought over to other platforms, or expanded upon in their scope right now.
In terms of features, the new Google Meet update brings the ability to resize a focused window when within a meeting. In other words, when a video is pinned or put on spotlight, the window will take up most of the frame, but users can also now load multiple speakers on pin or spotlight. As a result, multiple users can now be assigned larger windows with the rest of the meeting attendees listening to the speakers grouped in even tiles. The update also allows users to resize their own video feed windows, therefore organising the kind of layout that a user would get when in a meeting on Google Meet.
Finer improvements that are rolling out with this update includes AI exposure improvement, which reads the frame that you are sharing to automatically adjust video exposure in terms of how bright and visible your face is in the meeting. While this was officially rolled out as an update on Meet for phones, it now comes to Meet on web browsers, too. The other big feature is Autozoom, which is a neat Google Meet feature that automatically scans a frame, and zooms into the centre of a subject to align them evenly across the frame. This feature is available only to enterprise, paid circles with Google Workspace users.
Finally, Google Meet has listened to all the privacy and data security threats in the wild and introduced video backgrounds – a new feature that lets you select among three preset background videos that can silently play behind you, as you attend a meeting. This is the same as a virtual background that have already been available, and to begin with, virtual video backgrounds will only be available in three styles – classroom, party and forest. The update comes after reports claimed that inadvertent video calls and photos are leaking personal information, hence leading to information security threats around the world.
