How Google Meet’s New Features Benefit Students & Teachers

The Google Meet video-communication platform keeps evolving at a rapid pace, and the latest features will make life even easier for teachers and students. Over the past few months, Google has added a ton of new tools to the service, such as the ability to resize and move video feeds, a data saver mode, and AI-assisted automatic zoom. Some fun additions such as video backgrounds for making video calls more engaging have also arrived recently.

Inspired by a meteoric demand for video calling solutions to handle work as well as learning, Google also waived the 60-minute limit on calls for at least another year. As adoption went up, Google Meet received even more tricks, including the ability to end meetings for everyone, a ‘mute all’ button to calm down the ruckus of an online class, live captions, Meet integration in Google Classroom, and emoji reactions.

Google has now announced a slew of new features to make Meet an even more compelling platform for education. To start, Google Meet will automatically provide every teacher and co-teacher a host privilege, allowing multiple teachers to share the classroom duties. Moreover, Meet will soon support multiple hosts and will allow users to choose a co-host of their choice. Students in the waiting room will be admitted to a class as soon as their teacher comes online. Additionally, students in the waiting room won’t be able to see or communicate with each other, somewhat like waiting rooms on Zoom.

Meet Leads Rivals On Features, Including Zoom

Another notable feature coming to Google Meet in the future is the ability to live stream a video call directly to YouTube. A beta version of this feature will be rolled out later this year, and it will be widely available for educators with a Teaching and Learning Upgrade or Education Plus subscription next year. Livestreaming on YouTube is quite useful, as it negates the risks and hassles that come with admitting people outside of an institution into a group video call. For example, it could be a good way to prevent scenarios like Zoombombing.

Google is also bringing live translated captions to Google Meet later this year. As the name suggests, it will automatically translate and transcribe speech when an attendee speaks in a different language, in real-time. This is similar to how Google Translate’s live transcription feature works on Android phones and Google Meet already supports live captions in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. In addition, a ‘video lock’ feature that allows a meeting host to disable the camera feed of all attendees is also coming.

Google Meet will also soon allow users to pin multiple tiles to customize their view during video calls. This can come in handy in situations like when putting a speaker and a sign language interpreter side by side. Moreover, Google is also improving the hand-raise feature, making it more intuitive than the implementation on Clubhouse and other rival platforms. Google Meet will now show a persistent notification and will chronologically arrange all attendees raising their hands in a grid. Once the person is done talking, their name will automatically be removed from the Google Meet list.

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