Google announces updates to Meet, Spaces & Voice

Google Workspace is getting a number of updates. You should according to Google Blog Entry Help connect larger teams and improve employee engagement in collaboration. Innovations will appear in the coming weeks and months.

Google Meet updates

In the future, Meet video conference participants will be able to interact using emojis like thumbs up, hearts or a smiley. These reactions are displayed above the interacting person’s avatar. This would make the meetings more lively.

Users of documents, presentations or spreadsheets will soon be able to start a Meet conference directly in the relevant document. All participants can work on a document at the same time and share ideas. All this should be done in just one tab.

In the future, there will also be a picture-in-picture mode for Meets. This feature is initially only available in the Chrome browser and allows you to keep the conference in the foreground in a small window, even if you switch browser tabs. For example, an email can be sent while viewing a meeting.

The Google Companion mode for Meet is also updated. In the future, users will be able to view their video tiles from the companion mode and the laptop’s camera.

Later this year, it will also be possible to use the Questions and Answers functionality and polling features within the Meet Liver stream. For regular Meet meetings, these are already available.

Space updates

In the future, very large teams should also be able to use the spaces. The maximum number of team participants will be increased to 8000. In the future, it should even be possible to have up to 50,000 users in one place.

A so-called “inline threading” functionality has recently been installed in Spaces. This should allow you to reply directly to chat messages and thus be able to have a side conversation that no longer affects all members of the area.

Google Workspace is also improving chatting and searching in Spaces to display the most relevant results, files, and conversations.

Joining a space should be easier in the future. Existing users are given the opportunity to share a link to join. It will also be possible for members of the organization to browse and join the existing spaces of the organization.

The possibilities to modify content in a space are also expanded. It will be possible to establish guidelines for regions and to identify content managers.

Google Voice Updates

Google Voice is also updated. In the future, there will be a function where phone calls can be recorded and played back as required. It will also be possible for premium users to record conversations automatically.

Later this year, “SIP Link” will allow users to connect SIP channels from their communications provider of choice via Oracle, Cisco, Ribbon, and Audiocodes certified session board consoles.

Google already made some of these announcements at its I/O 2021. Read more about them here.