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Google Meet premium video meetings–free for everyone
- ciguy 7y agoDoes this give better sound quality? Because the sound quality on meet (Or is it Hangouts?) has been abysmal for the last few years. I also have no idea what meet actually even is these days. Is it just a rebranded hangouts or did they add something and merge Hangouts in?
- leoh 7y agoIt is Google Hangouts oriented for businesses. I would try to reach out (or have your team do it) if you have a business account.
- oaiey 7y agoIt is a different product. But I am not so sure about the codecs ;)
- izacus 7y agoI've used it and never noticed bad call quality and it performed pretty much very similar to Zoom. Not needing an installed app is a huge bonus.
- londons_explore 7y agoZoom doesn't require an app, they just hide the link to use the web version pretty well. You have to click to download the app, then cancel the download, and the link to join via browser appears.
- izacus 7y agoYeah, I had the honor of using their web app and it's significantly worse in quality than Zoom desktop app or Meet's web UI. The video was laggy, showed less camera frames and the UI itself was not responding well either. Significantly worse experience.
- qmarchi 7y agoThere's an asterisk to that. There was a not insignificant chunk of time that Zoom had to disable their web client, which was a pain...
- CydeWeys 7y agoThe Zoom web app is atrocious. I've been using it these past few weeks and it's an all-around miserable experience. Google Meet is a much superior product compared to Zoom's web app.
- yegle 7y agoI recently noticed if you are using Chromebook with certain Bluetooth device, you have to switch to use the Chromebook's internal mic, and it magically fixed the sound quality. Still a bug that should be fixed though.
- disillusioned 7y agoHangouts is rough, but Meet is far better. (Meet used to be called Hangouts Meet, but they're separate products and maintained separately, as they're putting Hangouts out to pasture.) Meet is their conferencing solution for GSuite, now opened up to the public. It's been around for years.
- threatofrain 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23017478 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23017478
- cube2222 7y agoI've been using Google meet as a remote student for a while (Google made meet available for free for education accounts a while ago already) and it's been a great experience, even with large groups of people online. We tested up to ~80 without any problems.
- leoh 7y agoJust was in a meeting with literally 250 people today, was really impressed how it held up.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rmac 7y agoa few days ago I was in a zoom meeting with 996 people. The mac client was sluggish on my 2017 core m3 macbook but the audio (and video when scrolling around gallery view) never lagged or went tin-y.
- xylophoner 7y agoyale art talk?
- masonic 7y agoI used Google meet yesterday on a Samsung phone (GS7),and in ~80 minutes almost the entire battery was drained and the phone was too hot to handle. I powered down completely to recharge.
- freepor 7y agoA multi-person video call should be expected to heavily drain a battery. 80 minutes is impressive.
- saberience 7y agoMy company uses Zoom and we do our monthly whole company meeting using Zoom without issues. Whole company is roughly around 700 and I've seen us get up to 600 without issues.
- jpkeisala 7y ago> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. If there is no guest accounts this will not be intresting for many.
- londons_explore 7y agoAgreed. While requiring a Google account to host a meeting makes some sense, requiring an account to join a meeting will simply mean too much friction and users will use another platform. The equation is simple. Users use the first platform they can find where both sound and video works for every person they want to talk to. "Jim can't get into the call" soon leads to someone piping up "shall we try zoom instead?". It's easy to see how this happened too - all Google engineers have Google accounts (for their work), so when testing this out, never encountered the issue. I predict they'll change their stance in a few months when they see zoom still crushing them in user numbers, but by then it'll be too late - people will remember meet as that app which is "finicky to get to connect because everyone has to remember their password"
- tyre 7y agoThis is specifically for business meetings and the quoted text says that the restriction is for _individual_ accounts. So this announcement doesn’t target family hangouts, but the product doesn’t either.
- londons_explore 7y agoIt means "If the person who created the meeting has an @gmail.com account, then all people joining the meeting must log in."
- crazysim 7y agoThey definitely saw Zoom crushin' in an internal call. Hilarious. https://9to5google.com/2020/04/25/google-meet-zoom-competition-executive-son-story/ https://9to5google.com/2020/04/25/google-meet-zoom-competiti...
- petters 7y agoI left Google and the Meet team a while ago. Would have been great to experience this 30x growth though! Being oncall these days would have been interesting. I have used Meet a lot both personally and professionally this spring and I think it's great. Been waiting for this announcement!
- tehlike 7y agoI'm a loyal user of hangouts.
- guilamu 7y agoYou are "loyal" to an app?!
- okt 7y agoWhy can't be one loyal to an app?
- tsukurimashou 7y agohaving a concept of "loyalty" for apps and corporations is beyond me
- tartrate 7y agoLoyal user is a well-recognised term in marketing among other areas meaning someone who keeps using the product over a long period of time. It's not more complicated than that.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoYes, but "loyal user" is in the same box as "target audience" and all the other terms in the marketing vernacular. This is a language of people taking advantage of others, talking about their victims. It makes little sense to use such language voluntarily on yourself.
- sneak 7y ago> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. Reminder: it is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number (and thus permitting access your traditional identity information with it: name, street address, et c) to Google, who can then tie it to any existing Google cookies and your IP. Demanding that your communications partners dox themselves to Google to talk with you is incredibly rude.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- DrScump 7y agoit is impossible to get a Google Account without giving your phone number I just now tried the Google account creation process on an unactivated mobile device, and entering a phone number can be skipped. Entering a birthdate was mandatory.
- sneak 7y agoTry it on Tor, a VPN, or some other IP that doesn’t drop your physical location.
- auscompgeek 7y agoI once attempted to create a Google account from a university (which has their own ASN), and Google still asked for a phone number.
- DrScump 7y agoGoogle still asked for a phone number Asks for, certainly. Requires was the claim. Google asks me a dozen times a day to enable Location Services. Yeah, right.
- AsyncAwait 7y ago
- DerWOK 7y agoNo end-to-end encryption plus forced Google Mail registration preventing anonymity. Yawn, Google. Yaaawn!
- travbrack 7y agoMeet supports up to 100 participants. That would be pretty tough to do e2ee. Is there a service that can do that?
- booi 7y agoeven just e2e for 1:1 meetings would be great
- joshuamorton 7y agoDuo supports that.
- bigiain 7y agoThis is new/experimental/not-ready-for-prime-time-yet, but publicly available and works: https://jitsi.org/blog/e2ee/ https://jitsi.org/blog/e2ee/
- m12k 7y agoHow come this is hard to do with 100 participants? Not a crypto or video encoding expert, but I'd have thought each participant would have a decryption key for their stream, and this key they would transfer to others by encrypting it separately with each other participant's public key and then broadcast that bundle to everyone. Thus everyone else can decrypt only their entry in that bundle using their private key, and gain access to the shared decryption key for that individual stream. When a new person joins, they add their public key to the central list of public keys, and request that everyone update their bundle to include an entry encrypted with their public key. So basically, from the perspective of the new joiner, each stream would be encrypted until that streamer had updated their bundle to allow the newcomer access to their decryption key. But each streamer would still only need to encrypt their stream once, and then share access to the decryption key only to participants. Scaling wise, sending only incurs the cost of encrypting once - though as a receiver, you'd need to decrypt N streams using N different keys - but is that much harder to do than decoding N video streams in the first place?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- gchokov 7y agoAnother Google service that I will not use because of privacy concerns.
- est 7y agoAnother Google service that I will not use because of shutdown in 3..2..1....
- techntoke 7y agoYou can use Zoom and have them install backdoors and give your information to Facebook.
- lucb1e 7y ago... or Wire or Jitsi or Signal or Jami or one of a dozen others. Heck, even WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams are preferable to these two. But yeah let's single out the only alternative that's actually worse and give that as counter-example.
- techntoke 7y agoYou can't even compare 100+ group video chat services to 1:1 or 1:10 video chat solutions.
- geppetto 7y agoGood news for all the school people that has been using it for learning purposes only (eg my students). That said there are good alternatives already like jitsi or - time limit apart - zoom.
- lasky 7y agoJavier Soltero has a long history of getting useful shit built well and in people’s hands, quickly. Nice to see him still at it, not hampered by even Google’s bureaucracy.
- fraencko 7y agoI use meet professionally on a daily basis as my company is a GApps for business customer and most people I talked to are pretty satisfied. Sound, connection and video quality is very good, far better than Slack in my opinion. We had meetings with more than 100 paticipants. Integration in Google Calendar is also a big plus. One pretty minor thing that bothers me is that the webcam and mic mute toggles and the hang up button are blended in and out on moving the mouse cursor during a call. I'd prefer to at least have the option to let the toggles stay onscreen as I tend to use the mute mic toggle a lot during a meeting. Also there is a moment of awkwardness every time a call ends because many participants look for the end call button. It's a great thing that I can use my Smartphone as a mic during a meeting. Would be great if this could be expanded to my phones' cam as a webcam replacement.
- CtrlD-me 7y agoCtrl+d toggles the mic
- Tobu 7y agoThat's the shortcut I use for bookmarking, get off my lawn.
- sixothree 7y agoSkype for business uses Win-F4 to mute. No kidding.
- e12e 7y agoPro tip: alt+f4 also mutes... ;)
- sixothree 7y agoRight, that's my point. Which makes me think this is really a sick joke by some disgruntled engineer. Out of all of the 48 major keys each with 16 possible modifier key combinations, how on earth did they settle on the one keystroke within a thumbnail of closing the application. It's not just rude. It's an F-you to the user.
- amyjess 7y agoWhen we went all-WFH in March, my company switched to Meet for almost all of our meetings (though some use WebEx), and it's fantastic. Audio quality is great, nobody has trouble connecting, etc.
- grandinj 7y agoI don't have the mental space to waste filling it with details of another Google communication product they are going to discontinue in a year.
- tartrate 7y agoThis is just a tool for work.
- jasoncartwright 7y agoPlease spare us this trite cliche being rolled out again
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kartayyar 7y agoGoogle products ( and other tech company products ) are discontinued when they don't take off. Meet has a 100 million daily call participants. And really with video conferencing product, I don't get the whole trope of "but they might discontinue it." - the utility is immediate in terms of the calls that you make with it, and time boxed till by when a call ends.
- brynjolf 7y agoReader?
- pfranz 7y agoThere's also the product "treadmill" for chat and video apps that Google and Microsoft have had over the past handful of years. There is buy-in even for a chat app. I often have to shuffle browsers, may or may not have to install something, have to judge if the other person is interested in trying new software. Does everyone have a Google account? If I'm joining someone else's meeting, what's the process? Is there a meeting id? Password? URL? I think "mental space" is quite appropriate.
- 7y ago
- thulecitizen 7y agoRemember, you are the product here. Free means they are working with the US government and the NSA, and this is straight up Orwellian surveillance capitalism. It’s a black box with backdoors which not even Google employees could be aware of. The NSA uses dragnet practices.[1] Don’t believe me? (Re)watch both Snowden and CitizenFour. [1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-tapped-internet-servers/amp https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-tapped-internet-servers/am...
- mr_gibbins 7y agoThey're late to the party. The canapes have been consumed, the beer has been drunk and everyone's down to that miscellaneous yellow dip and the leftover breadsticks. Zoom has won, Google, with Teams coming in a respectable 2nd place. No-one's got any reason to use your product.
- pibefision 7y agoTeams is growing fast, even being late to the party after Slack. If Meet really works well, they could grow quickly.
- corentin88 7y agoThis party is slippering. But the neighbors are partying as well. And they have way more beers. Google Meet is late indeed, but might gives some peps. It’s already a crowdy market - you forget to mention Messenger as well as some startups. Zoom has taken the lion’s part - apparently - but that’s very fragile share. Users jump from one service to another for many reasons (network issue, I’m used to X, let’s try Y, etc.) Only the ones with the more beers will be able to stay.
- jsnell 7y agoAll three of those platforms have released some numbers recently, and both the usage and the growth rate of the usage seems pretty comparable. All of the following quotes are from during April: One of them says: > Since January, we’ve seen $SOFTWARE’s peak daily usage grow by 30x. As of this month, $SOFTWARE is hosting 3 billion minutes of video meetings and adding roughly 3 million new users every day. And as of last week, $SOFTWARE’s daily meeting participants surpassed 100 million. Another: > We’ve seen a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day, a 200 percent increase from 900 million on March 16. [...] We’ve also seen total video calls in $SOFTWARE grow by over 1,000 percent in the month of March And the final one: > The maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on $SOFTWARE was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid. The quotes are not from the same time during April, and are not directly comparable in that sense. But if we're talking about the three options being a month apart on an exponential growth curve, it seems premature to call winners.
- alec 7y agoI work for Google, but not on anything related to Meet. I'm most excited about this because the video/audio quality is much higher. When I use Zoom with friends, everyone is usually 320x240, or maybe 640x480 if there's only one person. Doom was 320x240 in 1993. In Google Meet, I usually see people at 1280x920. A 4k monitor will fit 6 people at that resolution. I value this higher resolution because it makes me feel more connected to people.
- killjoywashere 7y agoG Suite domain owner and manager here, huge fan. Using zoom and meet a lot these days. Zoom’s voice prioritization is very nice compared to Meet. And if the Brady Bunch view is coming, I welcome it. My only other complaint is that my world (DoD health) blocks Most of G Suite.
- 7ewis 7y agoMeet already has grid view, can show up to 16 people.
- chillydawg 7y agoDoes it ? I've looked and looked and looked for it. I'm not running Chrome/Windows though, so presumably I'm a second class citizen.
- hooksfordays 7y agoIt released a week or two ago, so if you've been using Zoom recently, you might not have noticed. It's under the overflow in the bottom right > change layout. I'm on Firefox/Mac and has worked fine for me.
- mcintyre1994 7y agoI'm on MacOS/Firefox and it started showing a grid view for me a couple of weeks ago. I just assumed they were just rolling it out to replicate Zoom, but maybe it could have been configured somewhere on the G Suite side too.
- llarsson 7y agoOk, sorry for being dumb. Is Google Meet actually an entirely new service, or just re-branded Hangouts? When I make a calendar event and choose to add video meeting to it, it's now a Meet, when it used to be a Hangout. My experience with Hangouts (as recently as a week ago) was rather poor. Is Meet actually good/better?
- disillusioned 7y agoYour confusion is fair, considering that, up until two weeks ago, Google Meet was actually called Google Hangouts Meet. And yes, it is a completely and entirely different service. Hangouts is still the legacy chat program that featured some video and voice call capabilities. Meet is their Zoom competitor, built for GSuite users, and is under active development and is a very solid product with very strong video/voice performance, up to 250 attendees, dial-in numbers, live transcriptions, recordings, screen sharing, etc. They rebranded it as Google Meet literally two weeks ago. They are killing Hangouts Classic. They have... also spun up Google Chat (formerly Hangouts Chat) which is... a pseudo-competitor to Slack, and an evolution of Hangouts, but only for GSuite users, with the intent of killing Hangouts Classic (the evolution of GTalk) early next year. Meet is far more advanced and better supported that the legacy Hangout for a conferencing tool. It is far better, and we really prefer it. (Though, because it also bears mentioning, Google is ALSO working on Duo, which is their CONSUMER video chat program, which has some neat features, like AI audio gap-filling and super-low-bandwidth AV1 codec benefits, which I hope make the jump over to Meet soon...)
- llarsson 7y agoThank you for listing an ecosystem of services that, from my point of view, seem to be overlapping quite a bit. I hope they can prune or merge some of it, because it sounds exhausting: do I as a GSuite user talk with an external person (say, for a job interview) over a Meet or a Duo or a Hangout Classic... and what are the privacy policy implications of such a choice? Too exhausting!
- perennate 7y ago
- say_it_as_it_is 7y agoIt's as if a world of people have chosen to ignore how Google makes billions of dollars a year. Choosing Google rather than Zoom for privacy's sake doesn't address these concerns. Nothing is free, especially when Google is providing the service. You are the product. How are you the product with Google Meet? I can speculate, based on how it monetizes information in its other products. Google is processing all of the conversations through its deep learning systems, harvesting insights about everything discussed. This heightens privacy concerns 100x from whatever Zoom was attempting. Where are the activist blog posts about this? They don't exist because Google surveillance has been normalized. It's ok if Google does it.
- xuki 7y agoGoogle and FB could charge for this in the future, but for now they have to go with the free option. Nobody will switch from Zoom to their offers if it costs the same amount of money.
- thulecitizen 7y ago> Where are the activist blog posts about this? I honestly have no idea. I think it's scary! I wrote this comment on this thread and it got flagged/removed: "Remember, you are the product here. Free means they are working with the US government and the NSA, and this is straight up Orwellian surveillance capitalism. It’s a black box with backdoors which not even Google employees could be aware of. The NSA uses dragnet practices.[1] Don’t believe me? (Re)watch both Snowden and CitizenFour. [1] https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-tapped-internet-servers/" https://www.wired.com/2013/06/nsa-tapped-internet-servers/"
- newscracker 7y agoI have never used Google Meet, and don’t intend to use it now either. Anyone who wants to have just a group video or voice call with others (close people or acquaintances or strangers) can use Jitsi Meet (meet.jit.si). Jitsi Meet can also be self hosted if you prefer that. Jitsi Meet doesn’t require registration for anyone. We need to promote getting out of the Google and Facebook webs.
- gregdoesit 7y agoCan someone tell me the difference between Google Meet, Google Hangouts, Google Duo and Google Chat? Multiple of these support video and chat. I’ve used Hangouts and Chat and Duo before. Why the new brand “Meet”? And why have competing - even more importantly - confusing products at Google who seem to offer the same features? I would like to, but cannot be bullish on Google as a video communications platform for this reason.
- wanderingstan 7y agoLikewise. I’ve given up trying to understand the differences in feature sets, contact lists, and pricing.
- crb 7y agoCertainly. Hangouts was a brand that had both text and video. It has split into Chat (for text) and Meet (for video); both now revolve more around "rooms" as well as 1:1, and as such are primarily targeted at business users. Hangouts will now be going away and the legacy platforms migrated to the new. Duo is FaceTime for Android.
- abraham 7y agoDuo is also available on iOS and web.
- deadmutex 7y agoMeet was originally enterprise focused, with features like being able to record video, tight calendar integration, etc. Chat is also enterprise focused, similar to Slack. Duo is targeted at consumers, and has e2e encryption among other things. It similar to Apple's FaceTime. Hangouts is old school Google+ tech, the whereas the others use newer tech. E.g. There is some impressive tech behind Duo: https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in-duo-with.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/04/improving-audio-quality-in..., https://www.blog.google/products/duo/4-new-google-duo-features-help-you-stay-connected/ https://www.blog.google/products/duo/4-new-google-duo-featur....
- corobo 7y ago
- Traster 7y agoThis is great, did they list the financial commitments they made to keeping this product running for a minimum of 10 years? Because I don't see why anyone would migrate to a Google product. If you start using Zoom today, you've got a fair expectation that it will be around for a while. If you start using Microsoft Teams you can be extremely confident it'll be around for heat death of the universe. If you start using Google Meet today, I'd advise you to have a backup plan.
- benhurmarcel 7y agoMeet isn't a type of product that takes effort to migrate from. It's per meeting. Also, it's part of G Suite that they sell to companies, so it shouldn't be discontinued anytime soon. For free for consumer however, nothing guaranteed.
- ProZsolt 7y agoYou are right if you only consider individual users on their laptops, but companies also have to set up conference rooms with compatible equipment.
- Traster 7y agoWhen I've got a calendar full of meetings and they all have meeting links in them then yes, migrating away is going to be a pain- and that's assuming that they just EOL the product, and don't do what they've traditionally done which is to try and force you into one of their other crappy products. I still remember when every youtuber got forced into Google+. Youtube is per video! How bad could it be! Turns out, pretty bad.
- heyoni 7y agoIt’s free though. Not sure what you’re shielding yourself from.
- RandomBacon 7y agoIt's not free to write documentation and getting people used to it though.
- corobo 7y agoGoogle's just realised it's been asleep at the wheel eh? Used to be they'd fart out an internet changing mail service on a whim, now they pivot about as fast as an aircraft carrier in treacle. Better luck next once in a lifetime pandemic, big G
- kleiba 7y agoYay, more free training data for Google's ASR and computer vision algorithms!
- koolba 7y ago> We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. Is it considered acceptable use to create a throwaway Google account specific for this service? It’s be nice to have a video chat platform not controlled by China for the common man but I wouldn’t want my personal social activity on it to be directly linked to any real Google account.
- reustle 7y agoI use Meet many times per day for business and I'm very ready to move to something else. I am constantly hit with the issue where a user clicks the "ask to join" button, but the hosts nor anyone else ever sees a pop-up to admit them into the room. Super frustrating when on a phone call with a client trying to get Meet to work.
- AzzieElbab 7y agoCan't wait to install another app that does the same thing as 99 other apps on my phone. I mean, it good for everyone, right? A hundred apps with same functionality that I need to run simultaneously because people are using all of them, that should do something for higher end phones
- aloukissas 7y agoGoogle Meet is fine, but it's lacking a native app on desktop. Google being Google, my bet is that they'll never make one, and that's a pity. Some prefer not installing apps, but many like this separation. Think zoom, slack, teams, etc.
- ProAm 7y agoWhy would people give meeting information, content, participants list to be parsed and advertised against to Google?
- kinkrtyavimoodh 7y agoGoogle Meet is part of GSuite which explicitly does not do any of what you said (and the TFA says so too), but who cares about facts when a nice circle-jerk is going on.
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago> Here are just a few of our default-on safety measures: > • We do not allow anonymous users (i.e., without a Google Account) to join meetings created by individual accounts. So, all participants need to create Google accounts. How convenient for Google. I don't necessarily want to ascribe maliciousness here—there are certainly user-centric reasons to set it up this way. But, isn't it interesting how many of the security measures implemented by tech companies also just happen to align with their business interests in other ways?
- bdcravens 7y agoFreedom and privacy are often at odds with security in most areas in life. During war-like situations, security (speaking in the general sense, rather than purely technical) becomes a greater concern, so those companies that have positioned themselves that way will have increased opportunities.
- jplayer01 7y agoThere are other solutions around authentication that would be perfectly fine and still privacy-conscious. It's just that anything other than forcing you to login using a Google account doesn't mesh with their strategy of ensnaring users and adding to their all-encompassing profile of you.
- throwaway123x2 7y agoGoogle has yet to build a chat tool better than the old GChat / GoogleTalk-Gmail integration. It had voice and video (though not amazing quality, but it was 2006) and the chat was top-notch. It worked, it was integrated in my Gmail and it had text statuses which was honestly the best social media I ever used in my college days.
- sixothree 7y agoWhen they took that away it affected who I communicate with.
- CydeWeys 7y agoSame. I still miss Google Talk. It was the pinnacle of instant messaging, following and improving upon AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo which preceded it. I used it with Pidgin. It's all been downhill from there, now that everything is just a web app and you don't have an application that can sit in your systray and open its own windows.
- verdverm 7y agoJust tried out this Tactiq extension which will save the Closed Captions. Freaking sweet! Instantly the new standard for our meetings. https://tactiq.io/ https://tactiq.io/
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]