Google Meet video conferencing is now free for everyone — here's how to use it

Video conferencing platforms are winning in the lockdown 
Google has improved Meet to add tile-style conference calls and background blurring tech
Google
Amelia Heathman13 May 2020

Google Meet, the tech giant’s enterprise video conference platform, is now free to all customers to use during the lockdown, with unlimited time for meetings and AI noise minimisation.

Since the coronavirus pandemic spread across the world, people have conducted three billion minutes’ worth of meetings a day in Google Meet, with a total of three million new users joining the platform every day. People are using it for work meetings and classroom sessions, but Google wants to make it easier for you to use it to chat with friends or host a book club.

The free service, called Google Meet for Individuals, will be open in early May. All you need is a Gmail or Google account to get started, where you can set up meetings with up to 100 Google users.

All the features from the premium version, such as screen sharing, live captions using Google’s speech recognition tech, and a new expanded tiled view, that looks very Zoom-esque, will be available to use. Background blur and low light mode are rolling out to current subscribers at the moment so expect to see these in the free version too.

One cool feature of Meet is AI noise minimisation. This tech uses machine learning to minimise all the noise around you so that only your voice can be heard on a call. Kids fighting in the other room or the dog barking during an important work meeting? This shouldn’t be an issue anymore.

Security is also an important element of Google’s video conferencing. Hosts control who can come into a meeting and can remove participants who behave badly. Meeting codes can’t be guessed via brute force attacks, when a hacker submits as many passwords as possible with the hope of guessing correctly.

Meetings are encrypted in transit. That means, that in their connection to the cloud, however, they aren’t end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) like WhatsApp voice and video calls, because this means people wouldn’t be able to dial into meetings or record the meeting and save it to Google Drive for later access. If you do need an added layer of protection, you can enroll in the company’s Advanced Protection Programme which employs strong protections against phishing and account hijacking.

At the moment, Google Meet free meetings will be able to go on as long as you want, whereas Zoom’s free version kicks you out after 40 minutes. This will change from September 30, with free users offered one hour’s worth of video time.

Video conferencing platforms have certainly been the big winner in the coronavirus lockdown, though they haven’t been without their issues: Zoom has been criticised over its security issues, which it has since rectified, and Houseparty was subject to a suspected smear campaign on social media telling people not to use the app. For reference, Zoom and Google Meet both pass Mozilla’s minimum security standards test for video calling, whereas Houseparty and Discord fall short.

Time will tell if, when we’re all back to living our normal lives, these platforms will still be as dear to us.

How to use Google Meet for free meetings

In order to start a Google Meet call you need to have a Google account or Gmail email address so make sure to have one of these to hand.

Then go to meet.google.com to get started from your computer or download the Google Meet app (iOS and Android).

To start a meeting, all you have to do is hit the 'Start a Meeting' button and give access to your microphone and camera if you want to. Then a box will pop up which will allow you to add people to the meeting, where you can invite them via email.

Other participants don't need to have a Gmail address, it's only necessary for the person hosting the meeting.

Once you've added some people to the call you're ready to go.

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