Working from home isn’t going anywhere soon. As more and more businesses adopt a hybrid workforce, video calling is important to an efficient workflow. Google has recognized this and announced some additional UI elements to Google Meet’s web UI.
One of the most user-facing new options is that you can customize the grids displayed while on a video chat. Google has revamped things to add the ability to pin users and content to always have your most important view at the top. You can also drag and reposition callers and grids on the fly.
In the coming months, you will be able to pin multiple tiles to customize what you focus on. For example, you can highlight a presentation and the speaker, or multiple speakers at the same time. Participants’ names will always be visible, so you can quickly see who’s who, and better engage with everyone on the call.
Meet will also add some flair to calls with video backgrounds. Google has already recently added image backgrounds, but now you can have a moving video behind you to add some cool graphics to a boring conference call. It reminds me of live wallpapers on Android. Speaking of Android, this new feature will also be coming to mobile for Android and iOS Meet apps.
Lastly, Google is all about AI these days and we can’t leave Meet out, right? Meet will be using AI to create Autozoom. This will allow the field of few to zoom and center a user while on a call. Artificial intelligence will then square up the view and also adjust the lighting through software to present you in the best possible fashion.
All these features are still getting some final touches from Google. The web UI should start to see these updates next month. What do you guys think? Do you currently use Google Meet? Do you see yourself using some of these changes?