Google’s recently rebranded videoconferencing service Google Meet is gaining popularity amongst the users. Read on to know the latest developments…
Recently, video communication service Google Meet passed 50 million downloads on the Play Store. According to Mashable, touched 5 million installs in March, and soon passed 10 million downloads in 20 days. Due to the social distancing measures caused by Covid-19 pandemic – instead of booking meeting rooms, people are now sending invites for Google Meet and hold meetings and conferences virtually via digital means. As a result, more and more people have been downloading group video calling applications to meet their work requirements.
As per a recent report by Android Police. the Google-owned video calling app had 10 million downloads towards the end of March. As of May 17, the number of downloads increased significantly. This is contrary to the early attention which was received by Microsoft Teams and Zoom in the very beginning. A spike has been witnessed since Google made the application easily accessible to people.
Moreover, Google has made the service free of cost for everyone. However, it was earlier meant only for enterprises and students who used the group video calling application for educational purposes, and it eventually propelled people to download this app when compared to its competitors. It has also been integrated with Gmail and can be seen on the left sidebar panel of Gmail.
Google Meet Add-ons
To exploit the amazing features of Google Meet, couple of its must-have add-ons are necessary. These standout enhancements will supercharge your virtual meetings and make Google’s videoconferencing service more effective than ever.
Note that these add-ons currently work only in Meet’s web interface, when accessed via Chrome. The Meet mobile apps don’t support these sorts of extensions as of yet.
The smarter mute setup: Managing muting is without a doubt the most annoying part of a virtual meeting. Invariably, some users will forget to mute the microphone and then start crackling papers or rambling on about something at exactly the wrong time. For resolving this issue, download the dead-simple Google Meet Push to Talk extension. It does one thing and does it well: It mutes your mic in Meet by default and then unmutes it whenever you hold your spacebar down. That means you can sit comfortably and stare blankly ahead without having to worry about your mute status and then, whenever you want to talk, you can just press spacebar and hold it down until you’re done.
The silent reaction station: Speaking of too much speaking, how many times have you been in a virtual meeting and wished you could voice your stance on something without having to actually use your voice? Being able to give a thumbs-up, a nod, or a wave without needing to take yourself off mute and in a way everyone is still sure to notice — goes a long way toward reducing the noise in a videoconference and consequently increasing the sanity of its participants.
And that’s exactly what the Nod Reactions for Google Meet extension is designed to do: It adds a perfectly sensible panel into the upper-left corner of your Meet screen with a series of single-click reactions. Any reaction you click gets shown to everyone else in the meeting as a pop-up in the lower-left corner of the screen.
