Google has announced that its video conferencing app, Meet, will be made available for free to all Google account users starting next month. Google meet was till now only been available to enterprise users of Google’s G Suite platform.
All advanced features of Google Meet, which were previously available to enterprise customers, will be made available to G Suite customers as well. Earlier people could join a Meet call without paying, but the call had to be started by someone with a paid G Suite account. Now everyone can start calls on Meet without paying anything.
Google Meet will be rolled out to general availability over the coming weeks and will also be available via the Meet mobile apps for iOS and Android. Starting in early May, anyone with an email address can sign up for Meet and enjoy many of the features such as simple scheduling and screen sharing, real-time captions, and layouts that adapt to your preference, including an expanded tiled view.
Google meet will be gradually expanding to more and more people over the following weeks. This means you might not be able to create meetings at meet.google.com right away, but you can sign up to be notified when it’s available.
Google Meet has a 100-participant limit. Ordinarily, meetings would be limited to 60 minutes for the free product, but Google is not enforcing a time limit until after September 30.
Google Meet only became “Google Meet” earlier this month. Before that, the service was called Hangouts Meet. Recently Google added a new low-light mode to the App and it is available for both iOS and Android platforms.
In this Coronavirus pandemic times, people have been working from home and using video conferencing tools such as Zoom and Skype for office meetings as well as for social chats. Earlier this week, Facebook launched Messenger Rooms, will allow 50 users to make group video calls with ease. One can start and share rooms on Facebook through News Feed, Groups and Events.