- Good day there guys.
Pete Moriarty here
recording another G-Suite new features recap.
Google releases crazy amounts of new features every month
and we recap just the best ones for small business owners.
Let's get into another review update.
(upbeat music)
First up, the big news over the last couple of months
is that Google have released Google Voice in the US.
Yes, it's officially come out of beta.
It has now been released for everyone.
Now, we are gonna do a in-depth review video
on Google Voice itself, but I will let you know for now
that this is a fully integrated business phone system
that works with your G-Suite account.
So it'll allow you to make and receive calls.
You can even port in your business lines
and even, in the US I believe, your mobile numbers as well
and make calls right from within the Google interface.
Now of course, like everything Google,
it has a great mobile app,
works across all of your devices,
whether they're Mac, PC or even Chromebooks
and this is yet another way that Google are integrating
all of our most important business tools into the cloud
and all in their one beautiful G-Suite system.
Now I don't have any ETA
on when this will be released in Australia
so we are waiting to get our hands on Australian pricing,
Australian plans and how all that's gonna work
but for now I can say that we are testing it internally.
It's running great,
and we're looking forward to how
we will compare and contrast that
to our existing top recommended cloud phone system
which is Dialpad.
Now of course someone like Dialpad
are having Google hot on their heels
for enterprise mobility and communications.
You know, they're building out their features
and I would say that Dialpad are right now
years ahead of Google
with their feature like AI.
Some really cool automated routing of calls
and all those baked in features
that they've built into Dialpad
after their acquisition of the voice AI product
but Google will be hot on their heels of course
so it'll be very interesting to see
how that landscape pans out over the next couple of years.
Next up lets talk about a few more incremental updates
to the G-Suite system.
These are a little bit more boring but still important.
Dark mode has been rolled out to Android devices
and to IOS as well now,
so in your apps, whether you are using Calendar or Keep
there is now a dark mode on both of those apps.
Google will eventually be rolling it out to everything.
Now look, dark mode's not just a cool thing
that web-devs use.
Dark mode is actually gonna help you
extend your battery life
because less pixels actually need to be switched on
on certain types of displays
but also it's easier on your eyes.
Particularly if you're working at night
or anytime where the ambient light is darker.
Apart from just putting your screen brightness down
using dark mode in an app
is actually less bright lights
for your eyes to process
and that's a good thing for our health.
So dark mode, go and switch it on.
You'll find it in settings in the Calendar
and the Keep apps.
Inside of Gmail we have a few updates being rolled out.
Scheduled send is the biggest one for this month.
And so scheduled send allows you to send an email,
schedule it obviously for a later point in time.
Now, when might this be useful?
Well, if it's two o'clock in the morning
and you're still up working
and you're a freelancer
and you've gotta send that important email to a customer
but you don't want it to look like you were up
at three o'clock in the morning working,
well you can schedule it to send out at 9am.
That might be one use for it.
Or if you wanted to, for example,
send a reminder for a follow-up email
to somebody in the future.
Maybe you've delegated or you've assigned something
that's due at the end of the month
and you wanna send that follow up email
at some point a couple weeks in the future
rather than writing it down in your diary to follow up
you can schedule
and have that one ready to send in the future.
Nice little feature
and also being rolled out to the mobile as well.
Google Meet has a couple of awesome updates
that I've been waiting a long, long time for.
Number one is the multiple display layout.
So if you go to your layouts,
it's down in the bottom right-hand corner there,
and you can now open up different kinds of layout panes
to show the people that are on the meet.
Now this is one of the reasons
that we've been using Zoom for a long time
which is a competitor to Google Hangouts
and unfortunately it's a paid product
because it's out of the Google ecosystem.
And we've been using that when we have a staff party
or when we have a big team meet
and we wanna see everyone at the same time.
It's just a really great experience,
so Google have now integrated a similar feature
into Google Meet,
but unfortunately you're limited
to only four panes of people at the same time
which kinda sucks so when we do a big meeting
and we've got 20 or 30 people on a hangout at the same time
you just can't see everyone in the same time
that something like Zoom would do.
So we're fingers crossed
hoping that Google will actually open up some more panes
so we can see eight or ten people
in the same time inside of Hangouts.
But for now it's pretty useful to have these here
and the feature that I do like
is that it's automatic.
If someone's sharing a presentation
or if you've just got to meet with just people
and no presentations shared or anything like that,
Google's gonna automatically change the different displays
you know of course using their AI
and what they think is the best looking view for you
and make all of that nice and easy.
Another small update to Meet
is down the bottom
you can have automated captions happening.
Now you would have seen this automatically happening
inside of YouTube.
If you switched on Closed Captions for a video
that doesn't have a caption file uploaded.
Well what you can do in Meet is the same thing
and in real-time Google will actually transcribe
what's happening for whoever's talking in the Meet
and it's automatically gonna put captions down the bottom.
Now that's great for someone
who's first language might not be English.
If you're having a meeting with your team
and you know you wanna make it a little bit easier
for someone to catch up,
or just for someone who's maybe in a noisy environment
and can't really hear very well
it makes it easy for everyone to stay on the same page.
Love this feature.
Great for accessibility
for anyone who may not be great
at hearing themselves on a physical level
so great that Google has built this into their product.
Our final one to cover is Drive.
Not many exciting updates this month to report on
but Team Drives is now Shared Drives.
So remember that.
Update your training
and let your team know Team Drives
has been changed to Shared Drives.
Kinda makes sense
although if you have a shared google drive folder
in My Drive
and a shared drive in Shared Drives
how do you know the difference now?
That's gonna be a bit tricky.
Anyway Google have made the re-name
so expect that to roll out to all of your apps.
If you'd like this video
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You get access to the news as it happens,
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and of course you get access to myself
and my professional team
for any strategy advice that you need
in growing and scaling your business using Google Cloud.
Until next time.
I'll catch you in the next video guys.
Cheers.
(vibey music)