Google Meet has AI for Video Chat (And It Is Not for Small Organizations): The Case for Face-to-Face AI
The basics have gotten very well for Google. Now, Citron and his team have to prove that AI truly can take video chat to an entirely new level. Even if it means fewer video chats.
The Meet has turned things around, in the last couple of years. In the early days of the pandemic, it rebranded the app from “Hangouts Meet” to “Google Meet” and has added a ton of features in the more than three years since. We use Meet here at Vox Media, and I much prefer it to Zoom. But I figured there wasn’t much room for Meet (or other video conferencing apps) to grow anymore.
To help combat the exhaustion of staring at dozens of video tiles on a Meet call, Google is also adding dynamic layouts that offer different sizes and shapes for those tiles. Tiles will still generally be rectangular, but if a bunch of attendees are in a conference room, that tile might be bigger so that you don’t have to squint at a tiny square to see who’s sitting around the table. There are a bunch of smaller Meet features coming, too, including one that adds a teleprompter above your Google Slides presentations while on a Meet call. (All are coming to Labs next year.)
Duet can attend a meeting on your behalf. You can attend the meeting by clicking an “Attend for me” button on the invitation, and by using Google’s auto-generated text. Attendees can discuss the notes during the meeting.
An umbrella term for a bunch of app-specific features. Duet in Google Meet means AI-based lighting and sound tweaks along with automated meeting summaries; in Chat, it means automatic summaries of long threads you don’t have time to read.
If Google Meet’s new AI tools are as good as advertised, you might never need to pay attention to another meeting again — or even show up at all. At its Cloud Next conference today, Google revealed a handful of new AI-powered features coming soon to Meet.
All that AI won’t come cheap, though: Google will charge $30 per user for access to Duet, at least for large organizations. (Aparna Pappu, the head of Workspace, told CNBC that Google hasn’t finalized pricing for smaller teams.) The same features that work across most Office applications are included in Microsoft Copilot. In both cases, you need a new set of tools to do your job.
If you’re a Workspace user, Duet is going to start showing up in practically all the apps you use. In some places, you can access it by clicking on the duet icon in the top-right corner. It is possible to ask Duet for help from within the email or document. If you want to, you will most likely be able to ignore Duet, even if you don’t like it.