Meet, to me, is the perfect balance of functionality and simplicity (as an end user). And features like this only make that more apparent.
Zoom and Teams always frustrate me, even though they're what I use far more often.
It's too bad that video conferencing is largely a game of who has the most boxes checked - IT admins and A/V folk are the ones that need to be convinced, and Meet just doesn't ...meet... their needs
Meet frustrates me immensely because I can't just fullscreen someone sharing an HD screen onto my HD screen and get 1:1 pixels with an overlay of faces (like Zoom does). Instead, I have to either not be able to read small text, or awkwardly pan in the recently-added "zoom" view.
I also think this is perhaps the top issue i have with Meets. The current UX does not consider the fact people share screen most of the time. having ability to go full screen to get 1 to 1 scale with some essential floating menus. Even more recent years when remote teams are the new normal.
It is pretty frustrated how limited the layout options are. The best workaround is to open a second Meet window and join the meeting in "companion mode" [0]. Then you can at least position the windows how you like, with each focusing on a different thing.
In Firefox, click on the small "Picture in picture" button, then click on the "full-screen" corner button to make any of the videos full-screen. OK you don't have the faces overlay, but you'll have a nice full-screen version of the presentation.
Just in case any Meet engineers are reading... It needs to let me put my self-view right under the webcam lens, so I can stare at myself and still be looking at the camera.
It's horrible slow on some computers/browser combos, which is my main gripe with it. Video quality is also much worse, but doesn't matter too much to me. And as with all Google stuff the UX is kinda weird and non-intuitive. What does all the different join options do? When should I use what? Why must all presentations be so small if I also want to see the presenter? Zoom is much better here.
Meet's GUI eats screen space and reduces the size of video feeds as a result with not being able to do anything about it. It took years for it to let you choose audio and video sources from the button itself like zoom has had forever and forced you to go into the setting panels and tap on 4 screens. Same with video feed layouts. I really dislike meet compared to zoom.
Zoom also transmits much higher quality video and screen share feeds than meet does.
This new feature is very impressive although, most echo cancellation is "mute everyone except one speaker" which leads to walkie-talkie style half-duplex talking, which really hurts normal communication flows. I wonder how they do it here.
It very rarely matters which product is "better" in any objective sense. If you are team that work with Teams, your meetings will be on teams. Teams could be much worse than Zoom or Meet, you wouldn't move your group from Teams for one meeting anyway.
We work with a lot of external customers. Teams, GotoMeeting, GotoWebinar, Skype, Google Meet, Zoom. And honestly, they all suck.
Getting logged in is always a problem. Setting my name permanently is literally always a problem (I have zero idea why). Viewing someone elses screen always stinks because the scaling is just not good.
On top of that you can't compare Teams to Google Meet because literally every organization has theirs configured differently. For some organizations, I can use my phone for audio. For others I can only use my laptop. So it's never an Apples to Apples comparison. Sometimes you have access to chat history; other times if you reconnect you lose chat history. The differences inside a product go on and on.
I used to use a lot of random services while at work, and then I found Jitsi (browser based) and honestly I’m astounded it hasn’t taken over because of its simplicity or ability to just handle anything thrown at it.
My Meet calls always end up pixelated, where Zoom looks perfect. That’s basically the only thing I care about after the audio quality, I often cannot read someone’s screen when shared via Meet. Zoom also feels lower latency but I never checked if that’s the case.
You might be hitting QOS limitations where traffic from Google is bundled with YouTube et al and served at a lower priority ?
In my experience Zoom is always slightly better, but at a nitpicking level. I use meet day in day out, and fallback to whatever we have in hand if it's unworkable (pixelation would hit that line), and never saw zoom or Skype or discord being significantly better at these times.
Agree, I find Meet is the simplest and works the best. I really appreciate the audio filtering -- don't ever hear colleague's typing or dogs barking or lawn mowing.
I think we are technically supposed to use Zoom at my employer, but almost everyone (at least in eng) just uses Meet instead. The UX is so much better, and it's rarer that something isn't working with someone's setup.
Also I swear the audio latency is worse with Zoom -- I find myself accidentally interrupting people more often.
Microsoft convinced the CIO that they can't meet regulatory requirements unless everything is recorded and under central compliance records management.
If Meet did "autorecord" combined with "autoshare recording with recipients" (specifically including Google Group recipients)... then it would be perfect.
As it is, we're gradually shifting more things to Zoom where that's either part basic functionality, or part easy to automate as things like Zapier are well integrated into the API.
We only use Meet for team meetings now, and we did use Gong.io to solve the above... but Gong is pretty expensive just to allow those who were out that week to catch up on a recording when they're back and if they care to.
Well I'd hope that's a property of a specific meeting and not all meetings, but team weeklies where those not present want to catch up, and the recording is only going to those regular attendees (members of a specific Google Group)... sure, that's a thing we would like to have.
Not sure what Gong's pricing is, but we evaluated a few different notetakers and settled on https://fireflies.ai/. $18 / month gets a recording and summary sent out to all invitees to the calendar invite, uploaded into Hubspot, etc. Very valuable for our sales calls.
You might be surprised finding out that nearly all meetings are recorded by one or more participants for transcription, automatic notes, summaries and action points.
Meeting recordings are available in Google Apps Script.
Autosharing can be easily solved by simple Google Apps Script. I scan my personal calendar and share recording to Slack channel when I detect group meeting with recording available. Mail me, so I can arrange something for you.
Autorecording - yeah, this is missing. There is paid Chrome Extension which do that, but I have never tested it.
I record all meetings locally regardless of the tool with OBS. But that is only useful to me as I don't ask for authorization and not sharing them. It is only because I know my mind will sometimes drift and I want to be able to replay part of the meeting.
Having said that, so many people don't record meeting I or someone else can't attend. This is annoying. It should be automatized so that if you miss part or all of a meeting you can still watch the record as long as you were invited.
That's a great idea to record locally. Do you keep a deep history or wipe after 30/90/365 days? Do you need any special hardware for it?
My memory is not great. I'm starting to have more calls with clients and it would be great to have a record rather than trying to take notes and conduct a conversation at the same time.
> It should be automatized so that if you miss part or all of a meeting you can still watch the record as long as you were invited
People generally don't like knowing that everything they say is being recorded
> That's a great idea to record locally. Do you keep a deep history or wipe after 30/90/365 days? Do you need any special hardware for it?
If there is anything I want to keep, I will usually take notes but sometimes I cut the small part I need and store it in a special folder. I just wipe once in a while the main "obs" directory, every other week or so. if I haven't felt the need to play back a video, I doubt it will in the future so I don't keep a lot of retention, it is pretty much only to help me when I am getting distracted or multitasking during a meeting. Most of the time when I feel the need to play back the video, it is immediately after the meeting because I know something important had been said but wasn't 100% focused and want to be sure I haven't missed anything.
But I don't have lots of meeting, a handful a week usually. I don't need special hardware, obs seems to be heavily multithreaded. It might hurt the battery usage if I am not plugged but no core is going very high in term of cpu and I don't feel any slowness. I am recording in the 2500/160kbps veryfast(medium CPU usage, standard quality) setting at 1080p, it takes like 1MB every 3 seconds.
The process is exactly like that of streaming a computer game along with local microphone audio, except one pushes the "Start Recording" button instead of the "Start Streaming" button inside of OBS. There's got to be a million (or more) howtos written on the subject.
Hardware-wise, it's pretty straight forward: GPUs (including the ones that are a part of most non-Xeon Intel CPUs) have been up to the task of realtime video compression for around a decade or maybe more, which allows for the heavy lifting to be done in specialized silicon.
A bigger concern than the technical practicality might be legal concerns that generally surround audio recording.
For instance: In my state, I am permitted to record any conversation that I am a participant in -- I don't need permission from anyone but myself, and I don't need to notify anyone.
But in the US alone, there's also 49 other states worth of laws on the subject, and they can vary quite a lot.
I have always had way more issues with meet than zoom. Guessing it is something about browser compatibility but participants regularly have issues with mics and cameras that I don’t see with zoom.
With Meet, time from opening the meeting link to joining the meeting is often <1 sec, whereas others (especially Teams) have painfully slow loading screens.
Meet is nowhere near "<1 sec" for me, but my employer doesn't provide the best hardware, neither. It takes several seconds for the camera to initialize.
Team's load time is atrocious, though, by comparison.
Meet is perfect, I’ve always loved it. Slick and not bulky. Works beautifully in the browser. Simple features that work seamlessly. The ability to share single chrome tabs is a godsend. Zoom has always felt like a clunky product to me.
As an "IT admin", it's not that I need convincing. It's that the rest of Googles "office" products are absolute amateur hour and support is non-existent.
> the rest of Googles "office" products are absolute amateur hour
Not quite sure about this. Gmail (both personal and company accounts) is IMO a great email client with loads of handy features, and I always felt Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/Drawings were well put together. Are they the best in class? I guess it depends what you are looking for. Could Drive be faster? Yes, that would be nice. But "amateur hour" sounds like we are simply using different products.
I have used Microsoft Office for 20 years and Google Docs/Workspace for 15 years. I much prefer the Google suite over the Microsoft one. I prioritize quality of user experience, ease of use, performance, platform portability, freedom from constant intrusive software updates, and not messing with the built-in Emacs key bindings built into every Mac (Various MS Office programs inconsistently disable those key bindings). YMMV, esp with UI and UX, but for me there's no contest.
Regarding support, that is not an issue I have never needed it for Google, but occasionally have needed for MS Office. So I can see why if you are using Office you would value that.
This isn't an area where simplicity wins. Zoom is targeted more towards professional use whereas Meet is more for casual or social use. It doesn't really support multiple displays, like I can't watch screen sharing on one display while moving the chat and video windows off to another display. Scaling options for screen sharing are inadequate and it doesn't even support real full screen display. Meet lacks advanced audio options that make it unusable for things like music lessons. Zoom has more third party integrations available.
I think because Meet is fully browser based, some of the features like sharing audio with screen are only available via chrome or chromium based browsers -- definitely not on Firefox in my own testing. I don't know the exact reason for that, but it's kind of sad.
Yeah downloading an app for video calls feels very skype. And it's a non-starter for me personally given Zoom's history of lying about privacy and encryption.
That's fair. Everyone comes to these sorts of positions with a stack of values[1]. How that stack is ordered often determines one's choices.
One of the interesting things for me from a technological perspective is whether or not we're converging on what the ideal set of features for a "video phone" would be. If there was a broad enough consensus on the core feature set I would hope an 'appliance' version would be available which would eliminate needing to use a general purpose processor (and all the risks that entails) for this sort of meeting.
[1] From your response I infer that you value "no native code" and "sandboxed javascript" highly which guides you to the choice to use Meet, vs someone who might stack "User Experience" more highly than those two and end up at a different choice.
I think more critically it doesn't support remote control. I have no idea how they have missed that critical feature. Do people really enjoy "now scroll down, no a bit more... back a bit... there! stop!"??
Meet requires a Google account to attend a video call while Zoom does not. So if your hosting a meeting with strangers, using Meet is not user friendly.
At least personally I refuse to make a Google account bc it requires giving Google my phone number... But I know that's a bit of technoludditism in the current zeitgeist
Is this new? I have definitely joined Meets calls from my personal laptop and I don't have a personal Google account. This includes my last job interview, and, well, I got the job.
Perhaps it's meeting specific, or organization specific?
You can join a Google Meet meeting without a Google account if the meeting creator enables the “Anyone with the link can join” setting, or if they accept you when you click the link.
It's been over 6 months since I've looked into this, so it's possible my info is out of date - but the “Anyone with the link can join” setting is only available to people with a paid Google business account. Nobody in my department had anything like that
Unfortunately, it's only a matter of time until one their VPs decides to "improve it" with the usual imbecile ideas they come up with.
>Google Meet now scans all your files so they can get shared automatically with all members on the meeting when it is appropriate to enrich the conversation. You cannot opt-out this feature.
Zoom and Teams always frustrate me, even though they're what I use far more often.
It's too bad that video conferencing is largely a game of who has the most boxes checked - IT admins and A/V folk are the ones that need to be convinced, and Meet just doesn't ...meet... their needs