Recently, Google has introduced new features for the Meet app. Earlier, the one who hosts the meeting has to pay a certain amount. The rest of the users can join free for the meeting. Now, Google has made the Meet app free for all its users. Meet can connect up to 100 people at a time, as it seeks to gain popularity among many video conferencing apps.
Moreover, this is the first time that a product designed for enterprise use is being extended for individual users. The outbreak of COVID-19 has made video conferencing app like Zoom more popular. There are some security issues with the Zoom app, still, people are preferring it for meetings. Facebook has also launched Messenger rooms which allow 50 people to participate in a call at a time. Facebook has also launched Messenger rooms which allow 50 people to participate in a call at the same time.
Smita Hahim’s views:
Smita Hashim, Director, Product Management, Google Cloud says “Since video conferencing is an essential service, Google decided to extend its Meet offering to individual users for free on the lines of its other services such as Gmail or Maps, the Mountain View”.
She also added” We’ve already seen how Google Meet has been helping a lot of businesses and schools. We kept seeing the need for a very secure as well as easy-to-use, high-quality service for individual users as well. These apps are being used in ways that are unprecedented right now.”
Hashim also said” There are so many ways in which people need video conferencing right now. Even for business use, it could be for telehealth, it could be retail, it could be again education. We really felt like there was a need for very secure, as well as a reliable and high-quality product. We hear stories all the time from customers telling us how they’ve been productive, from schools on how they’ve been able to continue online teaching. I really do feel that some of the changes here will hopefully stay as a society and also leave us a better place to live in”.
Google Meet is seeing growth in daily usage by 30x and roughly around 3 million users signing in every day amid of COVID-19 outbreak.
Meet app is from Google, it will be different from other accounts in terms of security. As already there are billions of Google accounts. The company is also confident that its network infrastructure will upscale quickly to meet new demands during the time of the COVID-19 outbreak.