NICK: Welcome, everyone.
Today, our session is going to be on Google Meet.
We'll cover various topics here on Google Meet,
but kind of the goal of today's session
is getting enterprise ready with Google Meet.
We've got Kim, an expert from our Google side,
here to lead you through the session.
If you do have any questions or comments during the call today,
please, feel free to add them to the right hand side
there on the YouTube link.
We have a team of experts here that
will be able to support you through the call,
answering those questions, while Kim herself presents.
And if you do have any questions, please, add them.
We'll get to them, and then, yeah, Kim,
if you want to go ahead and take it away.
KIM NGUYEN: Great, thanks, Nick.
Hi, everyone.
I'm Kim Nguyen.
I'm a product marketing manager for Google Meet.
Thanks for joining me today to learn more about Meet
and how it can make your enterprise communications meet.
I say this with great confidence,
because we have dramatically transformed
Meet over the past 24 months.
We've added new features, and overall, just
hardened the product to make sure you
and your colleagues have the tools
you need to collaborate from the office and everywhere
in between.
And the great news is, as Google Workspace customers,
Google Meet is included in your subscription,
so you don't have to pay anything
extra for a secure and easy to use conferencing product.
So let's go and get into it.
As we all know, our world has changed,
especially the way we work.
With today's work realities, the physical office is no longer
the center of gravity for work, and now, remote and hybrid work
are really the new normal.
So we need a communication tool that
can accommodate the nature of work
differently and provide the right
physical and digital spaces for each type of worker
in your organization and also to think
about how to replicate the effectiveness
and energy of creating together in the same room
when you're actually not.
And with hybrid work, we think it's
important to maintain the following, collaboration
and creating, both together and apart, as I mentioned,
to connect effectively and maintain a sense of culture,
and very importantly, to protect your corporate assets
and privacy.
As Meet is part of the larger Google Workspace ecosystem,
I also want to spend some time on how we fit in.
First of all, Google Workspace has
supported a fully Cloud based solution from its inception.
So hybrid work was a natural transition
for our users to work [AUDIO OUT] Google
has a unique approach to addressing customer pain
points.
Bridging communication and collaboration
across email, documents, and communication tools
is the magic of Workspace, and it's now
the world's most popular productivity tool
with over three billion users and more than eight
million paying customers.
And it's important to note that organizations
don't choose Workspace to simply replace their existing tools.
You all choose it to transform the way
you work and get work done, and that's certainly
true of Google Meet, which is at the center of how Workspace can
provide meaningful connections, whether in the office,
at home, or anywhere in between.
So our core tenet for Google Meet
is to provide secure and easy to use video calling
and meetings to connect people wherever they are.
Meet is also the only fully web based video conferencing
platform, and there is no download required whatsoever.
It's accessible from the browser on your laptop,
mobile, or tablet.
But what else sets Google Meet apart?
Well, there are four areas we believe sets
Meet apart from competitors.
They are being flexible and helpful,
helping users be more collaborative,
and providing a safe and secure environment.
First of all, Meet is extremely easy to use and inclusive.
We've worked hard to remove the barriers to having
great meetings on any device.
We also employ AI-powered innovations
to help people have a great meeting experience without them
having to even think about it, like noise suppression, custom
background, captions, and translations.
The next area that makes Meet different
is around collaboration.
We built Google Meet to help teams and individuals work
better together and enhance their interactions in meetings
and to help things move forward.
So we've done a lot, for example,
to enhance Workspace integrations with Docs, Slides,
and the Jamboard app.
And finally, we want people to feel secure and confident,
while discussing the most confidential company
information, so security is paramount.
As you can see on this slide, we've
done a ton to make Meet enterprise ready.
These are just a fraction of all the features
we've brought to Meet over the past couple of years.
I'll talk through the key ones on the upcoming slides,
but know that Google has put a lot of resources
behind making Meet a powerful, feature rich solution
for business communications that is
competitive with other conferencing platforms,
if not better in many areas.
So let me walk you through some of these features in more
detail.
So first of all, we provide support for large meetings,
and that's one way we make Meet flexible
for growing businesses.
While we're no longer fully working remotely,
large meetings still continue to be important because
of hybrid work.
Meet now has the ability to scale
to support meetings of up to 500 people with a 49-grid view,
so you can see a lot of people on one view.
And people in view dynamically will
change depending on what's going on in the meeting.
But please, keep an eye out on this space
because we are working on ways to increase this 500
number very soon.
Next is breakout rooms, which is a feature that
has been in high demand to enable small group
discussions for training, education purposes, et cetera.
This continues to be a very well-used and well-requested
feature.
Meet now supports up to a hundred breakout rooms.
Meet also supports live streaming
for up to 100,000 viewers, depending
on your Workspace addition.
Meet live streaming could be used
for internal all hands, large, college
lectures, or even externally through YouTube
for large town halls or other public meetings.
Greater inclusivity, translations, recordings
and transcripts, this next set of features
are all around how Meet can be helpful and be more inclusive.
With real time, translated captions,
Meet can help to break down language barriers or support
people who might be hearing impaired.
This is supported across a number of languages, including
French, German, Portuguese, Spanish,
and there are many more languages to come.
Being able to navigate multiple language for any size companies
is really a valuable and helpful capability
without having to spend more money on translation.
Recording in Meet is a very helpful way
to stay focused on the meeting without taking notes.
It's also very helpful to have a record
of the meeting that's automatically
saved to Google Drive.
The meeting organizer is email the link to the meeting,
to the recording that is, and it's also
available to everyone who attended the meeting as well.
Because the link to the recording is automatically
added to the calendar event post-meeting.
And one of the newest features is meeting
transcripts in Google Docs.
You can now transcribe a video meeting into Google Docs,
and then the transcribed file is then
saved into the host meeting recordings folder
in Google Drive.
It's very similar to the way meeting recordings work today,
and it is incredibly helpful as meeting transcription can
automatically capture the meeting discussion
and making it easy to follow up after the meeting
or serve as a record.
In the collaborative area, we've done a lot
to help meeting attendees better interact with each other
and better collaborate on content,
as well as have a better presentation experience.
With Q&A and polls, you can create better engagement
with participants during the meeting
by allowing them to ask questions.
Meeting moderators can also create
polls to query the audience for feedback
or just to have some fun with some icebreaker questions.
The next collaborative feature is the ability
to present and control your slides
directly from within Meet.
Now, this seems like a simple feature
by having the ability to see your content, your controls,
and your audience all in one place.
It makes the presentation experience so much smoother
and enjoyable, and soon, presenters
will also be able to see speaker notes as well.
And finally, perhaps, the feature
that really talks to collaboration
is the ability to bring a meeting right
into Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
You can co-edit on a document and still see
everyone in the meeting, and this integration with Workspace
is certainly an area, where Meet really
shines compared to how other conferencing platforms handle
co-editing in a meeting.
And the fourth reason that sets Meet apart, in our opinion,
is our industry leading security expertise.
We help protect user privacy with Google Cloud.
Customers own their own data.
We never sell your data.
Secondly, our ability to encrypt data, both video meetings
and Cloud recordings are encrypted
by default, both in-transit and at rest,
and stored in Google Drive.
We also have a number of controls for counter-abuse,
such as the 10 character meeting codes,
not being able to join 15 minutes in advance,
and other measures that include only the right people, that
ensure that only the right people have access to meetings,
and lastly, giving you the ability
to be able to securely deploy and manage Meet user data.
These security protocols extend to all of the ways
you can access Meet.
Of course, you can access Meet from your laptop and desktop
computers from iOS and Android mobile devices and video
conferencing devices, both from our third party partners
and our first party Google Meet devices.
As we embrace hybrid work and return to the office,
conference rooms and personal desktop devices
will increasingly be important, and Meet's hardware portfolio
is comprehensive to include first party and third party
devices that are available for virtually any space and price
points.
And we offer room kits, so you can
customize your room or integrated devices that
offer both videoconferencing and whiteboarding
all in one device.
Now, I'm going to share with you some exciting things that we've
already announced, but that are coming later on this year.
So starting off with improved call quality and reliability
for low bandwidth environments, we continuously
work to optimize Meet audio video experience,
even in low bandwidth.
What you're seeing here is called Portrait Restore,
where we're using AI to automatically enhance
the image that's in low light.
So whether you're sitting on the beach with low bandwidth
or a dimly lit coffee shop, Meet is
hard at work in the background, so that users
can have reliable audio.
And their video quality will have fewer freezes
and reduce blurriness.
And on the opposite end, we're also
working to give customers the best possible video
and presentation experience, especially when bandwidth
is not an issue.
We'll soon be supporting the next-gen AV1 video codec, which
uses half the bandwidth for current resolutions
or twice the resolution at the same bandwidth.
And the result is very high, recording, streaming,
and screen sharing.
So from great video to great audio,
Meet will also support spatial audio,
which means you'll hear voices of meeting participants
from the direction in which each person is positioned
on the screen, like it would be if you were in the same room.
So a very realistic and high fidelity audio experience
is coming soon.
This next section is going to be about
how we're improving the conference room experience,
starting first with adaptive framing.
One of the challenges of joining a meeting from a conference
room is that the conference room occupies the same size
tile as other individual meeting participants,
so it's really hard to see who is speaking in the room.
Well, adaptive framing is AI technology from Google
and our partners that tracks the active speaker
and even provides a view of meeting participants.
So you can see the audience reaction.
So adaptive framing will help the remote end truly
know what's going on in the conference room,
and that's coming 2-2 of this year.
Companion mode is a way for in-room participants
to have access to the same tools as the remote participants,
like chat, Q&A, polls, and reactions.
And we've been able to do that on our laptops,
but soon, you'll be able to use your mobile phone
and tablet to participate as well.
Another way to improve conference from representation
actually is to help remote participants know the identity
of the people in the room.
Today, when I'm joining from a conference room,
I'm identified as the conference room name
rather than as Kim Nguyen.
But soon, I'll be able to check into the room,
so everyone in the meeting can know me by name.
My name will also be in the Meet participant list
along with all the other participants who
are associated with that room.
Now, I want to talk about how we're
giving customers many more options in Meet hardware first.
We've enabled embedded interop between Google
Meet devices and devices from Cisco Webex and Zoom.
That means Google Meet devices can call into Webex and Zoom
meetings, and Webex devices and Zoom rooms can join Meet calls.
And this can be done very easily with just a push of a button.
These developments just happened the last four months,
so this is great news for you, our customers,
because it extends your calling networks.
You can easily call your customers, your partners who
may not be on the same conferencing platform
as your corporate platform.
And if you haven't already done so, please, give it a try.
It's so simple.
It's just pushing a button.
We'll also be giving you more choice
in Meet supported devices.
Just last week, Meet on Android appliances from Poly
just GAed and is now on the market, and later on this year,
Logitech is going to follow with the same.
Meet was previously only supported
in ChromeOS-based devices, so we're now
broadening our support to Android appliances
to give you much more choices in devices you can purchase.
And because Android devices are platform independent,
and if you have existing Poly and Logitech devices that
run another conferencing platform,
you can just easily switch to Meet
with an admin configuration and a Meet license
using the same hardware.
And with that, that's all I have to share with you today.
Thank you so very much for joining me
and for your business.
Please, continue to ask your questions here.
We promise to address all of your questions.
If there are any we don't cover during our time together,
we will certainly get to them, and answer, and share them
in the community.
I hope you found this session useful, and have a great day.
NICK: Awesome.
Thank you, Kim, and yes, thank you
all for the great questions.
I look forward to collaborating with you both in the community.
After this call, keep an eye out for kind of the comprehensive
write up of this session, the recording itself, and further
Q&A. But thanks, Kim.
Great session, and thank you for joining, all of you.
And have a great rest of your day.
KIM NGUYEN: Bye, everyone.